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THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE. 
ADRIFT  ON  AN   ICE-PAN.     Illustrated. 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
Boston  and  New  York 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

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THE 
ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

BEING  THE 

FOR  1911 
BY 

WTLFBED  THOMASON  GRENFELL 

M.D.  (OxoN.).  C.M.G. 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

1912 


COPYRIGHT,   I912,   BY  WILFRED  THOMASON  GRBNFELI. 
ALL  RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  March  rgra 


^ 

.^'* 


'^Z 


THE  WILLIAM  BELDEN  NOBLE  LECTURES 

This  Lectureship  was  constituted  a  perpetual  foundation 
in  Harvard  University  in  1898,  as  a  memorial  to  the  late 
William  Belden  Noble  of  Washington,  D.  C.  (Harvard, 
1885).  The  deed  of  gift  provides  that  the  lectures  shall  be 
not  less  than  six  in  number,  that  they  shall  be  delivered 
annually,  and,  if  convenient,  in  the  Phillips  Brooks  House, 
during  the  season  of  Advent.  Each  lecturer  shall  have 
ample  notice  of  his  appointment,  and  the  publication  of  each 
course  of  lectures  is  required.  The  purpose  of  the  Lecture- 
ship will  be  further  seen  in  the  following  citation  from  the 
deed  of  gift  by  which  it  was  established  :  — 

"  The  object  of  the  founder  of  the  Lectures  is  to  continue 
the  mission  of  William  Belden  Noble,  whose  supreme  desire 
it  was  to  extend  the  influence  of  Jesus  as  the  way,  the  truth, 
and  the  life  ;  to  make  known  the  meaning  of  the  words  of 
Jesus,  *I  am  come  that  they  might  have  life,  and  that  they 
might  have  it  more  abundantly.'  In  accordance  with  the 
large  interpretation  of  the  Influence  of  Jesus  by  the  late 
Phillips  Brooks,  with  whose  religious  teaching  he  in  whose 
memory  the  Lectures  are  established  and  also  the  founder 
of  the  Lectures  were  in  deep  sympathy,  it  is  intended  that 
the  scope  of  the  Lectures  shall  be  as  wide  as  the  highest  in- 
terests of  humanity.  With  this  end  in  view,  —  the  perfection 
of  the  spiritual  man  and  the  consecration  by  the  spirit  of 
Jesus  of  every  department  of  human  character,  thought,  and 
activity,  —  the  Lectures  may  include  philosophy,  literature, 
art,  poetry,  the  natural  sciences,  political  economy,  sociology, 
ethics,  history  both  civil  and  ecclesiastical,  as  well  as  theology, 
and  the  more  direct  interests  of  the  religious  life.  Beyond 
a  sympathy  with  the  purpose  of  the  Lectures,  as  thus  defined, 
no  restriction  is  placed  upon  the  lecturer.'' 


TO   MY   WIFE 


PREFACE 

I  SHOULD  like  to  preface  these  lectures 
which  I  am  about  to  deUver  by  a  brief  fore- 
word concerning  the  man  in  whose  memory 
they  have  been  founded.  WilUam  Belden 
Noble  was  unknown  to  me  personally,  while 
probably  some  of  you  at  least  had  the 
advantage  of  his  acquaintance.  I  think  I 
can  truly  say,  however,  that  I  am  conscious 
of  his  friendship.  A  life  like  his  makes  him, 
like  Kim,  a  friend  of  all  the  world. 

He  loved  the  things  I  love:  football  and 
athletic  games.  He  was  human  in  social 
relations  and  a  member  of  clubs  which, 
had  I  been  at  Harvard,  I  should  have 
wished  to  join.  He  worked  and  played 
and  loved  —  hard.  His  was  just  a  strenu- 
ous, natural  human  life.  And  in  addition 
to  all  this,  but  not  in  spite  of  it,  he  had 
the  vision  of  the  real  value  of  life.  He 
ranked  high  at  college.  It  cannot  be  said 
that  it  was  lack  of  intellectual  ability  which 
gave  him  the  faith,  which  I  hold  is  of  more 
value  than  anything  else  on  earth. 


X  PREFACE 

So  I  am  fully  persuaded,  not  only  that 
William  Belden  Noble  lived,  but  that  he 
still  lives  the  imperishable  life  of  those 
through  whom  the  life  of  God  is  manifested. 

Those  are  the  alumni  of  Harvard  who 
will  ever  be  among  her  benefactors.  Have 
you  no  debt  to  her  and  to  those  who  shall 
fill  your  places  when  you  too  shall  have 
"passed  beyond  the  bourne  of  time  and 
place"?  See  that  you  strive  to  discharge 
your  indebtedness  while  you  can.  If  of  the 
gold  and  silver  some  of  you  may  be  able  to 
give  her,  there  is  that  which  has  cost  you 
both  in  labor  and  life,  to  you  who  give, 
that  shall  sweeten  tenfold  the  joy  of  giving. 
But  that  which  alone  all  of  us  can  give,  and 
which  all  of  us  must  give  if,  like  William 
Belden  Noble,  we  are  to  be  worthy  to  be 
remembered  as  her  sons,  is  what  her  truest 
counselor,  Phillips  Brooks,  asked  of  you, 
—  the  gift  of  yet  one  more  regenerated 
human  life. 

Wilfred  T.  Grenfell,  M.D. 

December,  1911. 


CONTENTS 

I.  LiFB  AND  Faith 1 

II.  Christ  and  the  Individual  ...         39 

m.  Christ  and  Society 80 

IV.  Christ  and  the  Daily  Life  .        .       120 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 


LECTURE  I 

LIFE  AND  FAITH 

The  object  of  the  Noble  Lectures,  as  I 
conceive  it,  is  decidedly  a  practical  one.  It 
is  that  something  may  be  said,  and  in  such 
a  way  that  it  shall  induce  in  the  minds  of 
the  hearers  a  keener  desire  to  stand  for  just 
those  things  which  Christ  did  stand  for.  It 
is  to  beget  a  determination  to  reincarnate 
his  life,  in  the  conviction  that  so  our  brief 
tenure  of  human  life  may  be  most  useful, 
most  completely  fulfill  the  purpose  for 
which  it  was  given,  and  so  attain  the  whole 
achievement  of  which  it  is  capable. 

I  cannot  but  realize  the  diflSculty  of  the 
problem  presented,  while  at  the  same  time 
I  entirely  believe  in  the  supreme  importance 
of  it.  I  appreciate  most  deeply  the  honor 
that  I  should  be  asked  to  attempt  the  task. 


S:  .;.•:  the'  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 
>*•»**  t"  •  •     ■  ^  ■■ 

I  must  be  enjoying  much  the  same  sensa- 
tion as  the  diminutive  Jack  when  he  stood 
before  the  giant's  gate,  which  is  exactly 
my  idea  of  the  "  joie  de  vivre." 

The  choice  of  the  medical  profession  as 
a  lifework  should  of  itself  be  a  guarantee 
that  one  looks  upon  human  life  as  worth 
while.  For  it  is  scarcely  conceivable  that 
one  should  devote  his  entire  stay  on  earth 
to  the  effort  to  discover  and  carry  out 
methods  for  preserving  and  prolonging 
that  which  he  considered  practically  value- 
less. Being  unskilled  in  philosophy  and 
theology,  the  method  I  propose  to  adopt 
in  these  lectures  is  bound  to  be  empirical, 
and  may  possibly  appear  egotistic.  As  I  do 
in  purely  professional  work,  so  now,  I  can, 
I  believe,  best  argue  from  my  own  experi- 
ence as  to  what  I  think  may  be  helpful  to 
others.  I  recognize,  however,  that  there 
are  spiritual  and  mental  variations  in  hu- 
man minds  corresponding  to  well-known 
physical  difiPerences  known  to  medicine  as 
idiosyncrasy,  and  I  can  only  plead  for 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  8 

indulgence  if  I  am  guilty  of  judging  others 
too  much  by  myself. 

I  therefore  begin  my  first  lecture  by  stat- 
ing that  I  am  an  intense  believer  in  life  as  an 
asset  of  incomparable  value.  I  cannot  re- 
member the  day  when  I  had  not  a  passion 
for  life, — it  seemed  so  full  of  adventure. 
Stimulated  by  trophies  of  Indian  jungles 
which  had  been  sent  back  by  our  uncles  and 
which  graced  our  home,  I  decided,  almost 
before  I  learned  my  alphabet,  that  the  pro- 
fession of  tiger-hunting  was  the  only  one 
worthy  of  the  name.  Indeed,  all  my  lean- 
ings, hereditary  or  otherwise,  were  towards 
a  life  of  action.  My  forebears  have  almost 
all  been  physical  fighters,  and  I  presume 
I  could  hardly  have  escaped  the  heritage 
of  a  hatred  for  peace  and  platitudes.  An 
English  public  school  only  emphasized  in 
my  mind  the  conviction  that  physical  con- 
tests were  the  most  desirable  in  which  to 
excel.  It  never  occurred  to  me  that  the 
boys  who  labored  at  their  books  could  have 
discovered  a  field  for  adventure.  I  did  not 


4  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

for  one  moment  think  that  they  were 
worthy  of  anything  but  the  general  con- 
temptuous opinion  so  aptly  expressed  in 
the  names  by  which  we  knew  them. 

It  was  in  London,  when  I  was  first  on 
my  own  allowance,  and  free  from  any  super- 
vision of  body  or  mind,  that  I  discovered 
that  mental  activities  offered  a  chance  for 
adventure  as  real  and  as  worthy  as  any 
physical  field.  There  I  began  to  appreciate 
the  value  of  knowledge  because  it  enabled 
one  to  do  things.  When  in  the  operating 
theatre  I  watched  men  familiarly  and  with 
confidence  achieving  magnificent  results 
in  relieving  pain,  prolonging  life,  and  re- 
storing capacities  by  their  masterly  mental 
qualifications,  life  seemed  suddenly  to  loom 
up  ten  times  as  attractive  as  I  had  ever 
dreamed  it  could  be.  But  there  was  a 
larger  realm  of  thought  which  no  one  could 
fully  comprehend.  Many  of  my  teachers 
were  men  with  wide  reputations,  who  were 
to  me  almost  as  demigods,  but  among  them 
there  was  a  vast  difference  of  opinion  on 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  5 

this  subject.    Some  were  silent,  all  were 
reticent  regarding  it. 

The  ordinary  exponents  of  the  Christian 
faith  had  never  succeeded  in  interesting 
me  in  any  way,  or  even  in  making  me 
believe  that  they  were  more  than  profes- 
sionally concerned  themselves.  Religion 
appeared  to  be  a  profession,  exceedingly 
conventional,  and  most  unattractive  in  my 
estimation,  —  the  very  last  I  should  have 
thought  of  selecting.  I  considered  it  effemi- 
nate, and  should  have  strongly  resented  the 
imputation,  and  felt  heartily  ashamed,  if 
any  one  of  my  companions  had  suggested 
that  I  was  a  pietist.  I  am  not  excusing  my 
position:  I  am  stating  it.  I  made  an  ex- 
ception of  the  home  religion  of  my  mother, 
which  I  simply  put  in  a  category  by  itself. 

I  was  attracted  one  day  by  the  excite- 
ment of  an  enormous  crowd  outside  a  tent. 
I  was  living  at  that  time  in  Whitechapel, 
in  the  sordid  purlieus  of  which  the  famous 
Jack  the  Ripper  was  contemporaneously 
carrying  on  his  profession.   One  saw  every 


6  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

kind  of  evil,  and  every  variety  of  wrecked 
humanity,  but  among  many  vanquished, 
some  victors.  The  fight  between  good  and 
evil  in  the  individual  was  always  an  evident 
fact.  It  never  occurred  to  me  that  I  must 
at  some  time,  willy-nilly,  enter  consciously 
into  the  same  arena.  I  went  into  the  tent, 
and  there  I  heard  a  plain  common-sense 
man  talking  in  a  plain  intelligible  way  to 
a  huge  concourse  of  really  interested  people. 
The  man  made  me  feel  in  all  he  said  that  at 
least  he  had  thrown  every  ounce  of  himself 
into  the  issue.  In  a  most  matter-of-fact  but 
kindly  way,  he  pulled  up  a  long-winded 
prayer-bore,  who  was  irritating  the  audi- 
ence with  droning  platitudes,  and  the 
Almighty  by  conferring  quite  unnecessary 
information  upon  him.  He  even  cut  short 
the  choir  and  braved  the  organist,  when 
he  realized  that  their  silence  helped  more 
than  their  art.  He  ended  with  an  address, 
the  simplicity  of  which  left  no  doubt  in 
any  man's  mind  that  he  was  a  fighter  for 
the  practical  issues  of  a  better  and  more 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  J 

cheerful  life  on  earth,  a  believer  in  a  possible 
life  of  big  achievement  for  every  soul  of 
us,  both  here  and  hereafter.  His  self-for-. 
getful  appeal  for  help  left  a  determination 
in  my  heart  at  least.  Perhaps  I  had  been 
wrong  in  considering  the  main  object  of  the 
preaching  profession  to  be  preferment 
rather  than  social  uplift.  It  was  a  revela- 
tion, it  opened  a  new  vision,  and  I  guessed 
for  the  first  time  the  meaning  in  the  eyes 
of  the  knights  of  chivalry  in  familiar  famous 
pictures.  Somehow  religion  as  an  insurance 
ticket  had  never  interested  me.  The  selfish- 
ness and  even  cowardice  of  that  appeal,  to 
which  I  had  so  often  listened,  now  loomed 
up  in  the  worse  light  of  distrust.  That  which 
I  had  called  faith  was  after  all  unfaith.  The 
new  faith  which  there  dawned  on  me  for 
the  first  time  was  not  the  conviction  that 
God  would  forgive  me,  but  that  he  had 
already  given  me  things  of  which  I  had 
not  even  known ;  not  that  he  would  save  me, 
but  that  he  would  use  me.  I  went  out  with 
yet  a  third  field  for  adventure  before  me. 


8  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

and  far  the  largest,  to  add  to  the  glory  and 
beauty  of  life. 

A  new  factor  which  now  forced  itself 
upon  me  was  my  will.  I  believed  in  free 
will :  it  seemed  common  sense.  I  knew  that 
materialists  did  not,  and  that  most  of  my 
comrades  believed  in  Darwin  and  Huxley, 
and  in  the  teaching  that  we  are  all  slaves  of 
unbreakable  laws.  I  believed  that  I  was  at 
the  fork  of  two  roads,  and  could  go  down 
the  one  which  I  liked.  For  my  venture  I 
wanted  knowledge.  At  that  time  I  thought 
nothing  of  reading  just  as  late  at  night  as 
I  could  stay  awake  with  a  wet  towel  round 
my  head;  but  I  recognized  limits  to  my 
capacity.  I  was  forced  to  admit  that  there 
were  some  things  too  high  for  me.  And  yet 
—  I  must  go  ahead.  Only  thus  will  any 
man  find  his  field  for  adventure.  Courage 
and  every  noble  virtue,  and  every  idea  of 
the  romantic,  worth-while  world  in  which 
I  live  would  be  gone,  if  I  did  not  believe 
in  free  will.  "After  all,  it  is  not  that  we 
strive  to  do  the  impossible,  but  that  which 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  9 

to  the  self  of  mere  experience  looks  im- 
possible." ^ 

I  was  prejudiced  for  an  adventurous 
world.  The  other  dull  material  world  was 
unbearable  to  me  anyhow.  Science  taught 
us  that  the  phenomena  of  life  worked  out 
in  an  orderly  manner;  and  that  from  ob- 
serving the  facts  governing  that  order,  cer- 
tain results  were  discernible.  The  embryo 
of  an  egg  developed  wings  and  flew.  A 
similar  embryonic  cell  in  the  ocean  grew 
fins  and  swam.  The  processes  never  got 
mixed  and  no  human  being  could  alter 
them.  Some  men  who  posed  as  scientists 
(that  is,  those  who  knew)  talked  as  if  "na- 
ture" or  the  "laws  of  nature"  controlled 
all  these  wonderful  things.  They  were  so 
familiar  with  them  that  they  might  almost 
have  invented  them.  But  the  "forces  of 
nature,"  the  force  that  is  outside  ourselves 
thenceforth  to  me  spelled  "God."  It  is 
merely  a  fact  that  no  man,  however  much 
he  wishes,  can  really  make  mystery  a  bar 
to  faith. 

^  Bishop  Brent,  Leadership, 


10  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

All  business  has  to  be  conducted  to  some 
extent  on  a  credit  basis.  The  same  system 
applies  occasionally  in  the  realm  of  thought ; 
and  I  am  justified  in  using  it  in  the  sphere 
of  convictions.  I  am  convinced  that  this 
is  a  case  in  which  wisdom  is  justified  of  her 
children.  In  Ottawa  there  is  a  statue  of 
Sir  Galahad,  erected  to  the  memory  of  a 
young  man  who,  seeing  two  skaters  fall 
through  the  ice  on  the  Ottawa  River,  sprang 
in  to  save  them  and  was  drowned  himself. 
On  the  granite  base  of  the  statue  are  carved 
the  young  knight's  words,  "If  I  save  my 
life  I  lose  it."  Reason  may  say  he  was  a 
fool,  but  is  that  wisdom?  When  the  Lake 
Erie  steamer  caught  fire,  in  order  to  save 
the  passengers  it  became  necessary  to  steam 
fuU-spead  ahead  to  the  nearest  beach.  The 
flames  drove  the  passengers  forward.  Some 
one  must  stay  at  the  wheel  to  steer,  or  all 
would  be  drowned  or  burned.  The  keel 
struck  the  beach  just  in  time.  But  when 
they  looked  for  the  helmsman,  Robert 
Marsden,  only  a  common  sailor,  they  found 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  11 

him  dead,  his  blackened  body  lying  sunk 
down  on  its  knees  in  the  chart-room;  he 
himself  had  lashed  his  hands  to  the  wheel. 
The  Master  was  ridiculed  as  a  madman; 
but  the  Greeks  did  not  blame  Achilles  for 
his  choice.  Are  all  heroism,  all  impulsive 
nobility,  all  honor,  because  they  are  unrea- 
sonable, to  be  classed  as  folly,  and  to  be 
sneered  at? 

Once  in  a  heavy  cross-loop  on  the  Dogger 
Bank,  the  forestay  of  our  schooner  suddenly 
broke.  While  I  was  reasoning  out  what  to 
do,  the  skipper  had  her  before  the  wind,  re- 
lieved the  pressure  at  once,  and  saved  the 
mainmast,  and  probably  our  lives.  A  snap 
judgment,  an  instinctive  decision,  is  not 
necessarily  an  unreasonable  one. 

For  my  part,  I  came  to  see  I  must  start 
somewhere,  and  stand  on  some  basis. 
Should  I  stand  on  the  current  knowledge  of 
the  early  eighties,  which  was  about  as  stable 
as  a  Labrador  bog  and  has  already  gone 
the  way  of  flesh,  or  should  I  stand  on  faith  .^^ 
Down  which  road  should  I  go?    Whether 


12  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

demonstrably  intellectually  correct  or  not, 
I  decided  I  would  prefer  and  therefore 
would  try  to  follow  the  Christ. 

What  is  the  explanation  of  the  biased  or 
even  bitter  spirit  in  which  many  men  deal 
with  the  claim  of  Christianity  to  their 
attention?  In  medicine  and  in  all  other 
branches  of  science  we  are  at  best  supposed 
to  bring  our  problems  to  the  bar  of  our  in- 
telligence, without  a  bias  for  proving  or  dis- 
proving, but  simply  to  find  the  truth.  I  have 
had  men  come  in  the  middle  of  the  night, 
come  many  miles,  incur  considerable  ex- 
pense, just  to  discuss  prolonging  the  life 
of  a  patient,  who  had  no  more  claim  on 
them  than  that  he  was  a  fellow  man  in  dis- 
tress. Their  sole  desire  was  to  get  wisdom 
for  action,  and  they  considered  it  a  mean 
thing  to  worry  one  iota  about  the  trouble 
involved  in  the  attempt  to  prolong  mortal 
life.  The  very  men  who  strain  at  gnats 
when  it  is  a  question  of  real  life,  swallow 
a  camel  when  it  relates  to  mere  animal 
existence. 


LIFE   AND  FAITH  IS 

Among  other  odd  things  which  struck 
one  with  regard  to  the  acceptance  of  Christ- 
ianity as  a  method  of  Hfe  was  the  fact  that 
the  people  to  decry  it  most  loudly  as  a  rem- 
edy were  those  who  had  never  tried  it  at 
all.  The  loudest  denouncers  of  a  remedy 
for  the  body  should  be  those  who  have 
tried  it  without  prejudice  and  found  it  a 
failure.  It  is  considered  unscientific  and 
irrational  for  a  man  to  do  more  than  re- 
main silent  about  a  remedy  he  has  not  tried 
personally.  If,  however,  he  were  to  form 
his  opinion  by  watching  others  try  it, 
it  would  be  equally  unscientific  to  judge 
of  the  experiment  unless  he  were  assured 
it  was  the  unadulterated  remedy  he  was 
seeing  used.  Those  who  have  studied 
Christ's  own  teachings  for  themselves,  and 
seen  his  varied  methods  tried  for  human- 
ity's sins  and  sorrows,  have  never  been  dis- 
appointed. Most  of  us  must  find  God,  if 
at  all,  in  the  experiences  of  everyday  life. 
One  cause  is  almost  alone  enough  to  justify 
and  quite  suflScient  to  explain  the  attitude 


14  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

of  mind  in  which  men  of  science  approach 
the  Christian  religion.  For  the  claim  of 
priest  and  theologian  and  religious  teacher 
of  succeeding  ages,  that  their  particular 
faith  was  knowledge  and  included  absolute 
truth,  was  as  demonstrably  false  as  it  was 
immodest.  "Truth  cannot  exist  in  a  church 
any  more  than  learning  can  in  a  univer- 
sity." Again,  their  ceaseless  attempts  to 
stereotype  the  intellectual  and  social  re- 
lation of  every  man  of  all  ages  according 
to  their  own  conception  of  what  the  relig- 
ion of  Christ  called  for  has  patently  held 
back  the  true  advance  of  the  race.  They 
captured  the  title  of  the  Christian  Church, 
"vi  et  armis,"  just  as  a  knight  does  the 
token  from  his  adversary's  helm,  and  ar- 
rested the  growth  of  the  real  church,  till 
it  became  like  a  miserable  stunted  cretin, 
for  whom  for  centuries  no  cure  was  thought 
possible.  Moreover,  they  enforced  their 
tenets  in  a  way  well  calculated  to  leave 
objectionable  impressions  on  the  minds 
of  scientists,  even  if  they  did  escape  the 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  15 

experience  of  Galileo.  No  wonder  that,  as 
MeComb  says:  "People  are  weary  of  the 
burden  of  theological  doctrines,  and  are 
asking  for  something  permanent,  something 
verifiable  in  experience,  which  no  criticism 
can  touch  and  no  progress  in  culture 
wither."^  A  young  German  divine  is  re- 
ported to  have  said,  "  Christ  came  to  save  us 
from  the  theologians ! "  Not  to  be  misunder- 
stood, I  would  say  here  that  I  am  myself  a 
member  of  a  church,  and  comforted  by  the 
fact  that  the  visible  church  is,  willy-nilly, 
enlarging  its  views  as  to  what  it  means  to 
be  a  Christian,  and  is  ever  more  and  more 
recognizing  the  social  side  of  the  service  of 
the  Master.  On  the  other  hand,  with  the 
increase  of  knowledge,  the  arrogance  of 
current  thought  is  groundless,  and  the 
scholar  no  longer  believes  he  has  a  mono- 
poly of  religion.  As  Peabody  has  pointed 
out,  the  scholar  has  discovered  that  "the 
conceit  of  learning  arises  from  not  discern- 
ing the  dimensions  of  truth";  and  that  "the 

*  Christianity  and  the  Modem  Mind. 


16  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

contest  between  religion  and  science  now 
interests  only  a  few  belated  materialists 
and  a  few  overslept  defenders  of  the  faith."  ^ 
We  must  reach  the  hilltop  of  learning  be- 
fore we  can  hope  for  the  full  view.  Emer- 
son says,  "Talent  sinks  with  character." 
The  Master  differs  from  teachers  like  Rous- 
seau, for  there  is  no  hiatus  between  his 
precepts  and  his  character.  Spiritual 
satiety  has  been  the  trouble  with  many 
scientists,  just  as  men,  after  a  dinner  they 
cannot  digest,  are  unable  to  climb  the  hill. 
Besides  this  cause,  the  heritage  of  wrong 
aim,  the  fact  of  sin,  the  heirloom  of  bad 
advertisement  also  remain.  To  make  men 
enter  the  church  to-day  there  exists  only 
the  same  road  which  leads  to  love  for  her 
Founder.  After  an  address  at  the  Cooper 
Union  in  New  York,  a  rabid  anti-Christian 
was  fiercely  heckling  the  speaker  from  the 
audience  and  abusing  the  church  of  to-day. 
His  arguments  were  so  drastic  and  yet  so 
specious  that  there  was  only  one  way  to 

^  Religion  of  an  Educated  Man, 


LIFE  AND   FAITH  17 

answer  him.  "Are  you  a  member  of  any 
church?"  the  speaker  asked.  "What  are 
you  getting  at?"  was  the  astonished  reply. 
"Well,  I've  been  for  twenty-five  years," 
continued  the  speaker,  "and  I  assure  you 
it  never  encouraged  me  to  rob,  to  kill,  or 
to  vilify.  If  you  really  want  to  satisfy  your 
mind,  I  advise  you  to  go  and  join  the 
church,  and  see  for  yourself  what  she 
stands  for."  The  suggestion  was  so  novel 
that  the  critic  rose  and  walked  out. 

On  returning  to  Labrador  one  spring,  I 
chanced  to  be  discussing  with  a  group  of 
men  on  the  wharf  the  reported  conver- 
sion of  some  of  the  toughest  and  hitherto 
untouched  characters  among  the  settlers. 
It  happened  that,  like  so  many  others,  they 
had  been  bred  to  despise  the  idea  of  con- 
version, though  laboriously  drilled  in  many 
denominational  doctrines  of  doubtful  value. 
That  a  conversion  like  St.  Paul's,  which 
meant  something  practical,  could  occur 
in  the  twentieth  century,  or  anywhere  out- 
side the  Bible,  seemed  to  them  ridiculous. 


18  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

There  was  a  lot  of  looking  down  and  nervous 
kicking  the  ground  when  we  endeavored  to 
talk  of  it  as  one  would  of  catching  fish. 
They  all  admitted,  however,  that  the  whole 
cove  had  been  altered,  and  men  and  women 
entirely  changed  for  the  better.  Various 
boats  with  different  kinds  of  apparatus  for 
catching  fish  were  coming  to  and  fro  from 
the  company's  wharf  as  we  were  talking. 
All  were  engaged  in  getting  fish  for  the 
same  firm,  and  all  were  eager  enough  to  gain 
their  end.  The  fish  were  not  trapping  well, 
and  the  humbler  "  hook-and-line  "  men  were 
the  only  ones  who  were  getting  anything. 
I  suggested  that  it  would  not  be  to  their 
credit  as  loyal  employees  or  as  men  of  com- 
mon sense,  if  the  trap-net  men  should  re- 
gard as  enemies,  or  find  fault  with,  or  try  to 
ridicule,  their  successful  comrades,  for  using 
methods  other  than  their  own.  The  sug- 
gestion that  the  adoption  of  such  a  course 
of  action  could  possibly  be  considered  a 
fair  demonstration  of  what  Christ  taught 
at  once  brought  a  denial  to  their  lips,  and 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  19 

a  side-glance  as  well  to  see  if  I  were  really 
in  earnest.  Yet  this  was  exactly  the  atti- 
tude of  one  body  of  Christians  to  another. 
There  was  no  rejoicing,  that  I  could  see, 
that  the  sole  purpose  for  which  their  own 
organization  avowedly  existed  was  being 
accomplished,  but  recrimination  that  it  was 
not  being  accomplished  in  their  way.  In 
this  case,  however,  the  whole  group  of  men 
immediately  indorsed  the  general  prin- 
ciple that  different  methods  were  entirely 
necessary  in  the  material  world,  and  also 
that  excellent  results  had  been  obtained 
in  this  instance,  for  which  their  own  sect 
had  nominally  striven.  It  had  certainly 
failed  for  so  long  a  period  as  to  endanger 
the  desired  result  being  accomplished  dur- 
ing the  lifetime  of  the  very  people  who  had 
now  become  new  men. 

I  could  cite  many  instances  where  faith 
in  Christ  has  very  apparently  altered  a 
man's  whole  outlook  and  action.  Naturally, 
most  of  my  observation  has  been  among 
fishermen,  and  it  has  included  men  of  al- 


20  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

most  every  kind  of  temperament.  One  was 
a  man  with  whom  I  afterwards  made 
several  voyages.  A  man  of  exceptionable 
physique,  he  had  been  the  victim  of  un- 
controllable temper,  and  various  of  his 
drinking  sprees  had  ended  in  the  police 
station,  as  the  result  of  violent  assaults  on 
others.  He  had  destroyed  his  home  and  his 
wife  had  left  him.  He  was  rapidly  ruining 
his  own  splendid  physique,  and  the  lives 
of  all  those  with  whom  he  came  in  contact. 
Suddenly  he  became  sober  and  peaceful, 
built  up  his  home  again  and  took  back  his 
wife,  and  developed  an  absolutely  unselfish 
passion  to  try  to  save  his  fellows  from 
the  slavery  that  had  been  his.  He  always 
claimed  that  his  faith  in  Christ  was  the 
secret  of  the  change.  He  was  so  cheerful 
and  so  uniformly  optimistic  that  his  very 
face  became  transparent  with  happiness, 
and  I  have  never  had  a  more  delightful 
shipmate.  I  once  asked  him  to  say  a  word 
to  encourage  other  men.  He  stood  up  to 
try,  and  unaccustomed  tears  coursed  down 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  21 

his  cheeks.  At  last  he  said,  "To  think  of 
the  Hke  of  me  talking  to  them  men,"  and 
sat  down.  This  class  of  men  has  been  well 
illustrated  by  Mr.  Harold  Begbie  in  his 
"Twice-Born  Men  "  and  "Broken  Earthen- 
ware." In  my  own  experience  it  has  been 
multiplied  many  times.  Indeed,  I  have 
often  wondered  why  so  many  clergy  and 
other  workers  have  asked  me  whether  I 
have  read  these  books,  as  if  the  results  they 
describe  were  rare  experiences.  It  is  only 
the  recording  of  them  that  is  rare.  There 
is  a  reticence  always  on  the  part  of  all  good 
workers  to  draw  deductions  from  their  own 
work  prematurely.  There  can  be  no  ques- 
tion of  their  occurrence,  however,  though 
my  own  experience  shows  me  that  these 
more  emotionally  susceptible  men  are 
most  liable  to  temporary  retrogression.  But 
even  so,  I  am  devoutly  thankful  for  such 
changes  as  may  occur  to  change  their  life 
and  environment,  changes  which  I  can 
attribute  to  nothing  else  but  their  faith. 
I  am  certain  that  any  one  who,  even  though 


22  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

without  faith  himself,  though  also  without 
prejudice,  would  seek  to  record  such  cases 
in  the  way  we  record  cures  of  disease,  — 
which  only  affect  part  of  men's  lives,  — 
would  be  surprised  at  the  extent  and  value 
of  suddenly  acquired  faith  in  the  Christ. 

Before  leaving  my  seafaring  friends, 
however,  I  would  say  that,  while  the  sud- 
denness of  the  change  of  habits  and  of 
life  has  been  unquestioned,  the  process,  it 
has  always  seemed  to  me,  has  been  less 
brief  than  they  themselves  supposed,  and 
the  conversion  could  have  been  almost  as 
justly  attributed  to  many  previous  experi- 
ences. Yet  I  ought  to  add  that  the  majority 
among  these  fishermen  who  are  endowed 
with  the  kind  of  faith  that  dominates  their 
whole  life  are  conscious  of  the  day  on  which 
it  became  a  potent  factor  in  their  lives,  — 
a  most  helpful  experience,  it  always  seems 
to  me. 

Among  those  of  my  own  class  in  life,  I 
have  been  privileged  also  to  see  not  a  few 
very  remarkable  changes;  but  the  process 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  23 

has  almost  always  been  gradual,  and  usu- 
ally accomplished  through  unselfish  service, 
which  is  Christ-following.  In  men  of  my 
own  profession  I  have  seen  just  as  unmis- 
takably the  results  of  Christian  faith.  From 
self-indulgent,  destructive,  wasted  lives, 
I  have  seen  them  become  just  such  minis- 
ters to  humanity  as  I  conceive  that  Christ 
calls  for.  Among  the  unfortunate  victims 
of  extreme  wealth  I  have  known  some  sud- 
denly accept  the  Christ's  view  of  steward- 
ship, and  without  dumping  their  wealth, 
for  which  Christ  never  called,  they  have 
accepted  their  responsibilities,  and  admin- 
istered it  with  such  love  and  wisdom  that 
their  renewed  lives  have  entirely  stopped 
the  mouths  of  critics. 

I  do  not  beheve  in  labels,  but  I  must  ac- 
cept that  of  utilitarian.  For  such  an  atti- 
tude faith  is  an  absolute  necessity.  At  the 
age  of  nineteen  I  was  living  with  a  clever 
lecturer  on  the  "Evidences  for  Christian- 
ity." His  shelves  were  literally  crowded 
from  floor  to  ceiling  with  scientific  and  phil- 


24  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

osophical  works  of  every  kind,  ancient  and 
modern.  His  life  and  talents  were  entirely 
devoted  to  demonstrating  that  our  Christ- 
ian faith  was  in  accord  with  the  scientific 
knowledge  of  that  day.  He  was  popular, 
and  I  believe  to  some  extent  successful  in 
influencing  men's  opinions  and  lives.  Any- 
how, I  have  seen  him  carried  home  on  the 
shoulders  of  a  London  crowd,  and  finishing 
his  address  from  our  upper  window.  At 
that  same  time  my  own  brother,  who  had 
taken  an  open  scholarship  and  a  brilliant 
"first"  in  Classics  at  Oxford,  had  just  fin- 
ished his  "greats"  examination  in  philo- 
sophy. In  this,  to  my  infinite  surprise,  he 
had  secured  only  a  second-class.  His  fault, 
according  to  the  examiners,  was  his  bril- 
liant memory.  He  had  quoted  accurately 
the  teachings  of  masters  at  variance  with 
one  another  to  examiners  who  did  not 
agree  with  any  of  them.  "  Where  wise  men 
differ,  fools  may  come  in,"  and  I  rejoiced 
that  I  felt  free  to  decide  to  order  my  life 
on  the  basis  of  Christian  faith,  a  position 


LIFE   AND   FAITH  25 

I  have  never  regretted  having  adopted. 
Phillips  Brooks  says  somewhere  that  "free- 
dom of  belief  should  not  mean  freedom  to 
believe  little  but  freedom  to  believe  much." 
On  a  perfectly  common-sense  basis,  I  have 
always  trusted  that  when  I  diflFered  from 
the  teachings  of  creeds  and  sects,  possibly 
I  was  as  likely  to  be  right  as  they,  since  I 
had  as  direct  access  to  and  as  great  a  claim 
on  the  promises  of  the  Giver  of  all  wisdom 
as  they. 

There  exists  an  absolutely  undeniable 
antipathy  on  the  part  of  theologian  and 
scientist  alike  to  allowing  this  freedom. 
One  says  you  shall  not  have  it,  the  other 
says  you  cannot,  though  the  value  of  its 
acquisition  has  the  indorsement  of  thou- 
sands, nay,  millions  of  our  fellow  men  of 
all  ages. 

Yet  we  cannot  take  up  a  newspaper 
without  seeing  accounts  of  these  same  men 
suing  others  for  restitution  of  goods  or 
money  out  of  which  they  have  foolishly 
allowed  themselves  to  be  swindled.     In 


26  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

these  cases  any  judge  would  like  to  say  to 
them,  "You'll  get  no  redress,  for  it  is  only 
what  you  deserve."  The  same  applies 
to  matters  which  affect  our  lives  more 
intimately  and  permanently.  Take,  for 
instance,  marriage.  The  ever-increasing 
number  of  divorces  show  how  these  most 
vital  and  personal  relations  are  undertaken 
without  any  reference  whatever  to  reason. 
It  is  the  same  with  our  play:  aviation, 
motoring,  polo,  football,  cards,  billiards, 
etc.  We  go  into  them  entirely  without 
reference  to  their  value  to  our  especial 
temperaments  or  requirements  or  capaci- 
ties or  physical  interests.  In  food  and  drink 
the  folly  and  credulity  of  man  is  shown  in 
the  absolutely  unreasonable  extent  to  which 
men  indulge  themselves.  Whatever  the 
result  may  be  in  the  brevity  or  longevity  of 
life,  these  excesses  affect  every  expression 
of  mind  or  spirit  as  surely  as  they  do  the 
physical  capacities.  It  is  not  unusual  for 
the  famous  Billy  Muldoon  to  announce  to 
a  new  degenerate,  "Sir,  you  have  no  mind. 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  27 

For  the  next  six  weeks  you  will  have  the  in- 
finite advantage  of  Billy  Muldoon's  mind." 
One  might  multiply  these  instances  in- 
definitely, but  the  only  point  I  wish  to 
urge  is  that  it  is  these  very  people  who  in 
everyday  life  stigmatize  even  the  man 
whose  life  has  been  demonstrably  benefited 
by  the  Christian  faith  as  a  fanatic,  as  a 
man  of  ill-balanced  mind,  as  credulous. 
But  so  strange  are  the  contortions  of 
mentality  that  many  times  men  have  said 
to  me,  "I  wish  I  could  believe  as  you  do;  it 
would  be  such  a  help  and  such  a  comfort." 
At  the  same  time  I  have  known  men  with 
death  threatening,  and  in  agony  of  mind 
for  those  they  must  leave  behind  them,  to 
whom  I  have  wished  above  all  else  I  could 
give  that  peace  and  rest  which  the  acqui- 
sition of  that  faith  invariably  carries  with 
it.  But  it  has  been  impossible.  "Christ's 
appeal  is  not  primarily  to  the  emotions  or 
to  the  intellect,  but  to  the  will."  It  is  not 
that  men  cannot  accept  the  Christ  nearly 
so  much  as  that  they  will  not. 


28  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

One  of  the  causes  of  this  mistrust  of  the 
Christian  faith  in  men's  minds  is  the  age- 
long misrepresentation  of  it.  We  have  such 
erroneous  ideas  of  what  the  Christ  pleads 
for.  "In  that  unhappy  moment,  centuries 
ago,  when  the  church  set  up  a  metaphys- 
ical text,  in  place  of  the  standard  of  moral 
excellence  and  personal  fellowship  with 
Christ,  it  lost  its  supreme  distinction  of 
symbolizing  the  unity  of  all  life  in  a  com- 
mon divine  source  and  in  a  common  im- 
mortal destiny."  ^  Such  bad  advertising  as 
Christianity  sometimes  gets  would  cer- 
tainly kill  the  desire  even  for  an  Eastman 
kodak  or  a  Winchester  rifle.  D.  L.  Moody 
said,  "The  Christian  is  the  world's  Bible, 
but  we  often  need  a  revised  version." 

It  was  at  this  decisive  point  that  for  the 
first  time  I  realized  I  was,  and  puzzled  as  to 
who  I  could  be,  and  why  I  was,  and  what 
I  could  do,  and  where  I  was  bound.  Some 
people  think  the  last  question  is  mere  silly 
sentiment.    But  it  really  is  not  only  most 

*  Paradise,  The  Church  and  the  Individual,  p.  248. 


LIFE   AND  FAITH  29 

natural  but  most  common  sense.  In  passing 
a  vessel  at  sea  we  almost  always  ask  first, 
"Where  are  you  bound?"  Somehow  that 
actually  interests  us  most.  I  have  found 
that  if  I  know  the  vessel  and  have  any 
affection  for  the  skipper  I  am  ten  times  as 
likely  to  be  concerned.  I  never  knew  one 
to  resent  my  question,  and  his  answer  usu- 
ally closed  with  "Where  are  you?" 

Now  it  so  happens  that  most  of  my  cruis- 
ing has  been  done  in  the  foggiest  region  of 
the  world,  and  I  myself  have  often  enough 
been  for  days  together  in  the  fog.  Because 
the  season  is  short  and  the  distance  to  be 
covered  so  great,  to  get  along  is  always 
a  question  of  first  and  imperative  import- 
ance if  we  are  in  any  way  to  satisfy  our- 
selves that  we  have  done  our  duty.  It  is  a 
horrible  feeling  at  the  end  of  the  season  to 
find  one  has  delayed  and  had  to  miss  out- 
sections  of  the  work.  This  is  not  because 
we  have  to  render  account  to  any  one  but 
ourselves,  but  simply  because  we  find  that 
we  are  far  less  wiUing  to  condone  any  faults 


30  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

or  omissions  than  a  master  over  us  would 
be.  It  therefore  happens  that  often  we  have 
to  run  ahead  in  spite  of  the  fog  and  take 
the  risk.  Incidentally  these  are  among  the 
most  exciting  times  of  our  lives.  The  risk 
itself,  the  adventure,  is  the  real  spice  of 
what  would  otherwise  be  prosaic  and  dull. 
Indeed  the  fact  that  the  coast  is  badly  light- 
ed, poorly  charted,  and  devoid  of  landmarks 
and  buoys  on  the  shoals,  not  only  keeps  us 
alive  and  quickens  our  capacities  but  gives 
us  a  realization  of  fellowship  with  our  friends 
sailing  the  same  seas.  Thus  we  get  a  much 
more  intelligent  love  for  one  another  as 
we  see  each  other's  fallibility,  and  we  come 
to  feel  that  the  work  is  more  worth  while 
because  it  involves  adventure,  and  because 
we  have  seen  that  not  every  man  can  or 
will  "launch  out." 

I  must  admit,  however,  that  when  run- 
ning in  the  fog  the  first  question  on  one's 
lips  as  one  sights  a  fellow  voyager  is  not, 
"Where  are  you  bound?"  but  "Where  are 
we?"    I  remember  the  first  time  we  were 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  81 

crossing  the  Newfoundland  Banks.  We  had 
spent  some  days  in  blanketing  fog  without 
a  heavenly  or  earthly  body  to  give  us  any 
information  about  our  position.  We  were 
somewhat  anxious,  not  knowing  which 
way  to  go.  Suddenly,  a  huge  three-masted 
ship  loomed  up  out  of  the  fog,  apparently 
running  oflF  her  course  with  conj&dence. 
We  had  time  to  cut  her  oflF  and  ask  where 
we  were.  She  replied  by  hanging  over  the 
side  a  huge  blackboard  with  the  approxim- 
ate latitude  and  longitude  on  it,  and  then 
disappeared  into  the  gloom.  We  were  not 
able  to  prove  it,  but  we  trusted  her  good 
faith  and  acted  as  if  it  were  true.  We  did  n't 
in  the  least  resent  the  suggestion  of  inter- 
ference in  our  private  aflfairs.  Many  and 
many  a  time  since  I  have  had  to  rely  on  the 
opinions  of  others  and  even  their  gratui- 
tous help.  At  one  time  we  were  running 
somewhat  too  confidently  on  a  part  of  the 
shore  which  we  thought  we  knew  perfectly 
well.  Indeed,  we  were  running  full  speed 
in  spite  of  our  inability  to  see.    We  were 


32  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

suddenly  aroused  in  the  wheel  house  by 
the  united  shouting  of  half  a  dozen  sten- 
torian voices,  "Hard  a'  starboard!  Full 
speed  astern!  —  or  you'll  be  ashore." 
These  presumptuous  people  in  a  trap 
fishing-boat  had,  quite  unasked,  interfered 
to  make  us  change  our  course,  and  had 
thereby  saved  us  from  a  catastrophe.  It  was 
so  dense  we  could  not  see  the  breakers. 
However,  we  found  we  had  made  no  mis- 
take in  instantly  acting  on  the  faith  that 
they  were  wiser  than  we,  without  waiting 
to  argue  the  rationality  of  it.  But  beyond 
this,  on  yet  another  occasion  in  thick 
weather  we  ran  right  by  a  boat  full  of  men 
and  almost  instantly  afterwards  sighted 
breakers.  We  escaped  practically  by  a 
miracle,  but  we  felt  badly  that  the  men 
in  the  boat  had  not  interfered  to  warn 
us. 

These  and  every  experience  of  life  seem 
to  teach  that  when  the  question  at  issue 
is  of  vital,  practical  importance  to  us  we 
have  no  prejudice  against  outside  advice. 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  83 

and  that  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should 
not  offer  such  as  we  may  possess,  nor  why 
we  should  not  accept  it  and  act  upon  it  as 
if  it  were  true,  without  needing  intellectual 
demonstration. 

Dr.  Crile  has  shown  that  anger,  fear, 
love,  anxiety  render  protoplasm  granular; 
just  as  the  shaking  of  steel  makes  a  much- 
worked  axle  brittle  and  unreliable,  so  these 
emotions  destroy  the  cells  in  the  cortex 
of  the  cerebral  hemispheres  just  as  would 
poison  or  a  blow.  It  is  through  these  im- 
portant cells  that  the  outside  world  is  in- 
terpreted to  us.  So  faith  that  brings  peace, 
is,  in  any  case,  a  physical  desirability  if 
not  a  moral  one. 

The  man  who  has  no  interest  in  life,  its 
meaning  and  its  future,  is  only  intelligible 
to  me  on  one  of  three  hypotheses :  either  he 
has  never  faced  himself  and  never  stopped 
to  think,  or  he  has  done  it  with  blind 
eyes  and  closed  ears,  or  he  is  no  man 
at  all. 

I  can  understand  the  position  of  the  spec- 


84  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

tator  at  the  great  games;  being  unable  to 
play  himself,  he  certainly  does  his  best  to 
show  his  sympathy  and  give  his  support 
to  the  players.  He  spends  much  energy 
and  at  times  makes  a  very  fine  show.  But 
his  outlay  is  more  or  less  pathetic,  for  he 
is  only  a  spectator  after  all,  —  and  he  is 
so  numerous!  I  know  there  is  no  need  to 
waste  sympathy  on  the  actual  players.  The 
glory  of  the  game  liberally  compensates 
them  for  any  damage  they  may  receive. 
The  man  to  whom  my  sympathy  always 
goes  out  is  the  substitute,  ready  and 
anxious  to  get  into  the  game — but  to  whom 
the  chance  is  never  given  to  use  his  capa- 
cities. His  loyalty  calls  for  unbounded 
admiration. 

If  there  is  iniquity  in  accepting  a  course 
for  true,  the  axioms  of  which  cannot  be 
demonstrated  by  mathematics,  this  is  the 
reason  why  I  rejoice  in  my  iniquity  (in 
accepting  the  Christian  faith).  My  choice 
has  given  me  such  fun  in  life,  and  still 
promises  to  do  so.  For  no  capacities  need 


LIFE  AND   FAITH  S5 

go  unused  in  the  field  of  Christian  ad- 
venture. 

I  have  as  much  right  to  my  position  as 
any  man  has  to  unfaith,  —  and  I  have  the 
deductions  of  common  sense  to  support 
me.  As  for  the  materialist,  he  at  least  can- 
not blame  me.  If  I  am  all  wrong,  I  am  at 
worst  the  victim  of  his  own  inexorable 
system.  When  we  recognize  our  finiteness, 
we  come  to  faith  as  rational.  I  do  not  ex- 
pect to  see  God  here,  and  live.  As  Chester- 
ton^ has  pointed  out,  though  somewhat 
sweepingly,  "Between  Hegel  who  believes 
in  nothing  but  himself  and  his  senses,  and 
the  materialist  who  believes  not  at  all  in 
his  senses,"  stands  Christianity  as  the  great 
Modus  Vivendi. 

If  I  were  to  quote  in  the  classroom  the 
words  of  the  Scripture,  that  the  natural 
man  does  not  want  the  things  of  the  spirit, 
I  should  probably  be  hooted  at  or  mildly 
ignored,  and  yet  it  is  perfectly  obvious  that 
this  is  really  the  case.  Even  if  we  know  the 
*  G.  K.  Chesterton,  Orthodoxy, 


86  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

best  path,  we  wish  to  walk  the  one  that 
may  not  cost  us  anything  in  everyday  life, 
rather  than  let  reason  sit  master  on  our 
control.  If  I  were  to  quote  Christ's  saying, 
"I  came  not  to  send  peace,  but  a  sword," 
the  retort,  even  if  unspoken,  would  un- 
doubtedly be,  "What  did  Christ  know 
about  it?"  Yet  the  unfailing  evidence  of 
facts  shows  every  day  the  inevitableness  of 
the  contest  if  the  best  is  to  be  made  of  life. 
Life  to  the  Christian  sounds  a  clarion  call 
like  the  last  words  of  Marmion :  — 

"Charge,  Chester,  charge; 
On,  Stanley,  on." 

Without  question  unfaith  is  too  often  a 
synonym  for  "don't  want."  It  is  like  the 
farmer  who,  when  urged  to  give  up  whiskey, 
remarked,  "Prove  I  don't  like  un,  and 
I'll  give  un  up." 

"The  great  causes  of  God  and  humanity 
are  not  defeated  by  the  hot  assaults  of  the 
Devil,  but  by  the  slow,  crushing,  glacier- 
like mass  of  thousands  and  thousands  of 
indififerent  nobodies.  God's  causes  are  never 


LIFE  AND  FAITH  37 

destroyed  by  being  blown  up,  but  by  being 
sat  upon.  It  is  not  the  violent  and  anarch- 
ical whom  we  have  to  fear  in  the  war  for 
human  progress,  but  the  slow,  the  staid, 
the  respectable.  And  the  danger  of  these 
lies  in  their  real  scepticism.  .  .  .  Though 
it  would  abhor  articulately  confessing  that 
God  does  nothing,  it  virtually  means  so 
by  refusing  to  share  manifest  opportunities 
of  serving  Him."  ^ 

It  is  not  to  complain  weakly  of  prejudice, 
to  besmirch  those  who  do  not  believe  as  I 
do,  that  I  have  thus  dwelt  on  the  strange 
reluctances  in  accepting  faith  as  a  guide 
for  action  in  matters  which  relate  to  our 
highest  interest  and  life.  Surely  in  the 
business  world  men  take  ventures  with- 
out waiting  for  intellectual  comprehension. 
When  the  venture  is  of  such  vast  importance 
as  accepting  a  guide  for  life's  action,  when 
the  Christian  faith  has  been  so  unanimously 
approved  by  those  who  have  really  adopted 
it,  when  there  is  at  least  a  possibility  that 

*  George  Adam  Smith,  Minor  Prophets,  vol.  n,  p.  54. 


S8  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

not  only  our  day  of  life  here  but  the  life  in 
eternity  will  be  benefited,  why  is  it  irra- 
tional to  accept  the  mystery  and  stand  on 
the  ground  of  "Lord,  I  believe.  Help  thou 
mine  unbelief." 


LECTURE  II 

CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

In  my  first  lecture  I  endeavored  to  defend 
the  deductions  of  my  own  experience, 
namely,  that  as  we  all  must  act  the  con- 
scious selection  of  the  pathway  pointed  out 
by  Christ  is  rational :  first,  because  it  is  the 
most  remunerative  solution  of  the  prob- 
lem; secondly,  the  most  interesting,  as 
affording  a  sound  basis  for  fighting,  for 
loving,  and  for  hoping;  thirdly,  the  most 
manly,  as  involving  hard  work  with  no 
immediate  vision  of  finality;  and  last,  be- 
cause it  bases  the  whole  on  the  satisfactory 
presumption  that  I  am  I,  and  choose  this 
course  myself. 

I  now  propose  to  try  and  indicate  how 
this  choice  works  out  in  men's  lives  what- 
ever their  temperament  or  activity.  I  am 
convinced  that  no  man  can  truly  say, 
"Christ's  way  succeeds  for  the  man  across 


40  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

the  street,  but  not  for  me."  I  do  not  argue 
that  a  man  can  by  his  will  power  make 
himself  believe  this  suddenly,  if  his  edu- 
cation and  mentality  make  him  sceptical 
of  it,  or  that  any  other  man  can  by  super- 
ior wisdom  convince  his  mind  of  the  truth 
of  it  by  much  talking.  But  I  do  contend  that 
with  however  Httle  faith  a  man  starts  out 
if  he  is  willing  to  work  on  that  faith  instead 
of  arguing  he  is  on  a  sure  road  to  satisfy 
himself  of  the  truth  of  it,  and  eventually 
to  know,  as  far  as  we  can  know  anything, 
that  the  Master  was  and  is  perfectly  right. 
You  cannot  find  the  Christ  by  searching 
with  the  eye  in  books  and  pamphlets; 
you  cannot  demonstrate  him  to  the  ear  in 
theological  lectures.  I  have  known  more 
than  one  man  try  these  very  ways,  and 
lose  in  the  process  the  little  faith  with 
which  he  began.  The  way  to  find  the  truth 
about  the  Christ  is  to  be  willing  to  under- 
take the  kind  of  life  that  common  sense 
translates  his  teachings  to  mean  in  this  age. 
When  at  Christ's  bidding  the  paralyzed 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      41 

man  found  that  he  could  walk,  and  the 
palsied  man  that  he  had  strength  in  his 
arm,  and  the  blind  man  that  he  could  see 
clearly,  they  were  all  convinced  of  the 
Master's  power,  —  and  the  cleansed  lepers 
acclaimed  him  before  ever  they  went  to 
the  priests  for  confirmation  of  their  cure.     ' 

The  popular  idea  that  Christ  asks  men 
to  sit  down  in  life  and  admire  him  is  absurd 
on  the  face  of  it.  The  greatest  Worker  the 
world  has  ever  known  asks  men  to  be  men 
and  follow  him  in  the  manifold  directions 
which  always  commend  themselves  to  man-  . 
kind  in  the  supreme  moments  of  life.  It  is 
not  our  recognition  as  we  pass  on  the  road 
of  life  that  he  desires,  but  our  personal 
loyalty;  not  vain  oblations,  but  "ceasing 
to  do  evil  and  learning  to  do  good."  His 
direct  appeal  is  to  our  sense  for  a  reasonable 
service.  It  is  always  more  the  appeal  of  the 
musician  than  that  of  the  dialectician.  The 
ear  hears,  but  the  soul  interprets.  The  mu- 
sician does  n't  argue;  he  plays,  and  the 
ear  that  hears  recognizes  or  interprets  the 


42         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

beauty  of  the  message  without  being  driven 
into  a  hole  by  words.  Alas,  for  the  ears 
to  which  a  Beethoven  sonata  reveals  no 
beauty,  or  the  eyes  which  cannot  see  the 
glory  of  the  solar  spectrum.  To  me  it  is  cer- 
tainly the  fault  of  our  interpretive  faculties 
if  we  find  no  attraction  in  the  person  of  Jesus 
Christ.  Just  so  it  is  sin  or  moral  perversion 
which  prevents  flesh  and  blood  revealing 
Christ,  and  that  is  why  faith  is  the  best 
service  we  can  render  humanity. 

A  long  and  varied  experience  with  many 
of  the  churches  has  left  me  confident  of  the 
wisdom  of  joining  one  or  other  of  them. 
None  have  a  monopoly  of  perfection,  but  a 
roving  life  has  taught  me  that  when  a  man 
is  hungry  he  can  well  afford  to  overlook 
imperfections  in  the  service,  so  long  as  the 
food  is  good.  One  morning,  after  I  had 
been  addressing  a  large  Bible  class,  a  keen 
young  fellow  came  to  the  house  where  I  was 
staying  and  asked  for  an  interview.  He 
said:  "I  got  an  entirely  new  view  of  what 
Christ  really  expects  of  me,  and  I  realized 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      43 

that  that  is  not  taught  in  my  church.  What 
would  you  advise  me  to  do?"  I  told  him 
I  had  had  some  patients  who  could  n't 
assimilate  food  even  in  the  form  of  milk, 
and  that  I  should  advise  him  to  go  around 
till  he  found  nourishment  in  some  church, 
and  then  cultivate  loyalty  to  that;  not  to 
stay  out  just  because  it  was  human  and  im- 
perfect, but  to  go  in  and  make  it  better. 
I  find  that  the  cause  of  the  trouble  is  just 
as  often  the  stomach  or  constitution  as 
the  meals,  in  these  days  when  the  public 
also  is  enlarging  its  views  of  what  good  food 
is,  and  beginning  to  insist  upon  having 
it.  While  the  Master  always  insisted  upon 
faith,  he  had  no  severe  rebuke  for  doubt. 
I  don't  believe  any  of  us  would  have  let 
Thomas  oflF  quite  so  easily. 

Bishop  Brent  ^  has  said:  "A  man's  vo- 
cation is  the  sphere  in  which  to  illustrate 
his  precepts";  and  I  now  propose  in  a  few 
words  to  try  and  show  how  the  Christian 
faith  affects  my  own  profession. 
*  Brent,  Leadership. 


44  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

The  temptations  of  the  surgeon  are  not 
the  same  as  those  of  the  priest  or  the  scholar. 
His  special  temptations  are  to  think  that 
the  prolongation  of  existence  limits  the 
call  of  life  on  him,  and  affords  a  field  large 
enough  for  all  he  can  contribute;  secondly, 
professional  prejudice  against  lay  inter- 
ference. 

Regarding  the  first  point  I  have  never 
doubted  that  the  prolongation  of  some 
lives  is  altogether  undesirable.  One  or  two 
examples  of  this  type  will  suflfice.  An  old 
sailor  captain  with  cancer  of  the  throat, 
which  woke  him  with  horrors  that  some 
one  was  strangling  him  as  soon  as  he  dozed 
off  to  sleep,  would  ask  me  so  piteously  at 
night  for  a  lethal  draught  that  I  used  to 
try  and  tiptoe  past  his  bed  as  I  went  round 
the  wards  to  avoid  the  pain  of  having  to 
refuse  him.  A  poor  fisherman,  incurable 
and  mentally  degenerate,  owing  to  a  creep- 
ing paralysis,  is  here  after  six  years,  killing 
and  starving  his  family,  as  he,  an  abso- 
lutely unintelligent  mass  of  flesh  and  bones. 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      45 

lies  groaning  and  moaning  in  bed.  Already- 
one  married  daughter  has  died,  worn  out 
with  caring  for  him  and  her  own  young 
family  as  well.  His  wife  is  rapidly  sinking 
also. 

Among  my  patients  in  hospital  to-day 
is  a  young  man  of  nineteen.  He  has  been 
under  my  care  for  eleven  months.  He  has 
tubercular  disease  of  the  hip  and  spine; 
there  is  no  hope  of  his  recovery.  We  can- 
not keep  him,  and  must  instead  send  him 
home  to  be  a  source  of  physical  danger,  a 
ruinous  expense,  and  a  cause  of  untold 
mental  anguish  to  his  loved  ones.  In  the 
cases  of  the  criminally  insane,  the  tuber- 
cular insane,  the  hopelessly  insane,  the 
sufferers  in  the  last  stages  of  incurable  dis- 
eases, and  others,  it  is  at  least  open  to  de- 
bate if  a  year  or  more  added  to  their  life 
on  earth  is  of  any  value.  It  is  questionable 
if  the  same  may  not  be  said  of  the  hope- 
less moral  degenerate  whose  vice  has  in- 
jured him  beyond  possible  physical  re- 
covery. The  state  admits  this  to  a  certain 


46  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

extent  in  the  use  of  capital  punishment,  and 
in  its  methods  of  preventing  criminal  re- 
production. Theologians  as  well  as  materi- 
alists have  assented  to  a  limit  to  the  day 
of  grace.  Pathologists  have  demonstrated 
the  damage  caused  by  the  neglect  of  these 
precautions  on  the  part  of  the  state.  I  am 
not  arguing  that  it  is  possible  as  yet  to 
identify  the  candidates  for  extinction,  but 
that  it  is  not  a  worthy  end  for  our  profession 
in  any  case  to  limit  their  aspirations  to 
utility  to  the  prolongation  of  mortal  life. 
To  have  life  is  not  nearly  so  important  as 
to  use  it  well.  Emerson  aptly  asks,  "  What 
is  the  use  of  eternal  life  to  a  man  who  can- 
not use  half  an  hour  of  this  life  well.f^ "  What 
we  have  is  never  so  important  as  what  we 
do  with  what  we  have. 

The  world  will,  I  know,  acquit  me  of 
egotism  in  claiming  for  the  profession  of 
healing  a  special  capacity  for  influencing 
the  whole  life  of  the  whole  man,  if  only  be- 
cause of  the  advantages  it  has  in  getting 
really  close  to  men  when  they  are  apt  to  be 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      47 

both  impressionable  and  thoughtful,  and 
stripped  of  all  conventional  restraint.  The 
real  end  of  all  social  service  should  be  to 
build  up  character;  "to  educate  personal- 
ity is  true  religion."  ^  The  ideal  object  of 
the  best  doctors,  lawyers,  scholars,  priests, 
or  indeed  of  every  good  man,  is  in  reality 
the  same  as  that  of  the  Master. 

I  once  carried  a  plant  I  had  found  to 
our  professor  of  botany  for  identification. 
"Young  man,"  he  said,  "a  botanist  does  not 
know  one  plant  from  another."  Rousseau 
wrote  a  standard  textbook  on  how  to  bring 
up  children,  and  dropped  all  five  of  his  own, 
on  the  day  they  were  born,  in  the  post-box 
of  the  foundling  hospital.  An  aurist  pro- 
posed the  theory  of  the  telephone,  and  a 
business  man  made  it  of  service  to  the  pub- 
lic. But  science  and  utility  are  coming  to- 
gether. It  was  left  to  the  young  University 
of  Kansas  to  risk  the  opprobrium  of  having 
prostituted  learning  to  commercialism,  by 
appointing  an  unlimited  staff  of  industrial 
^  Peabody,  Religion  of  an  Educated  Man* 


48  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

"Fellows,"  the  object  of  each  being  to 
discover  practical  values  for  apparently 
useless  products.  Through  their  special 
scientific  knowledge  they  obtained  casein 
from  buttermilk,  diastase  from  alfalfa 
stalks,  pituitin  from  the  hypophysis  of 
whales.  To-day  the  school  and  university 
and  social  training  in  England  still  discount 
all  commerce  and  practical  productive 
work,  as  less  worthy  of  the  true  gentleman 
than  either  fighting,  sporting,  or  speculat- 
ing. When  the  first  site  for  a  hospital  in 
Labrador  was  given  me  by  a  merchant,  he 
embodied  in  the  deed  of  gift  that  I  was  not 
to  trade  there,  for  fear  of  competing  with 
his  own  store.  I  remember  that  the  proviso 
jarred  on  me  in  those  days  as  being  almost 
an  insult.  Since  that  I  have  started  a  long 
series  of  cash  stores,  believing  them  to  be 
the  most  necessary  remedy  for  many  of  our 
diseases.  But  it  still  seems  to  rub  the  wrong 
way  when  I  am  asked  for  how  much  I  will 
sell  a  gallon  of  molasses.  Christ  himself 
teaches  that  the  effective  use  of  learning 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      49 

is  not  purely  intellectual.  The  awakening 
of  the  soul  to  the  need  for  an  alliance  of  the 
utilitarian  motive  with  our  will  is  one  sure 
stepping-stone  to  the  Christian  faith .  *  *  This 
faith  can  be  kept  alive,"  said  Cardinal 
Newman,  "only  by  personal  holiness  of 
life."  It  is  not  irreverent  to  classify  the  in- 
tellectual concessions  rendered  imperative 
by  the  willingness  just  to  be  useful,  or  by 
the  view  of  life  that  the  object  is  greater 
than  the  way  in  which  it  is  achieved,  with 
those  greater  sacrifices  of  faith  which  in- 
duced men  to  go  uncomplaining  to  physical 
death  for  others.  This  is  far  from  saying 
that  the  end  justifies  the  means.  I  plead 
only  for  the  adoption  of  a  concession  that  is 
as  ennobling  as  it  is  invaluable. 

The  great  risks  and  sacrifices  that  doctors 
have  ever  been  willing  to  accept  —  and  our 
profession  yields  to  none  in  the  long  list 
of  willing  martyrs  to  duty,  or  the  advance- 
ment of  learning,  when  the  value  of  the 
object  in  view  has  been  demonstrated  to 
them  —  is  indisputable.    It  would  indeed 


50  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

ill  become  so  humble  a  member  as  myself 
to  offer  any  criticism  whatever  on  a  pro- 
fession able  to  claim  such  a  record  of  heroic 
deeds  for  the  sake  of  others.  I  am  but  ven- 
turing to  suggest,  because  I  love  it  above 
all  others,  that  it  too  may  not  yet  have 
mounted  high  enough  on  the  hill  of  divine 
truth  to  value  to  the  full  the  glories  of  its 
own  opportunities. 

I  make  this  statement  because  I  am  ab- 
solutely convinced  of  the  value  of  religious 
faith  to  the  bodies  as  well  as  to  the  souls 
of  men,  and  because  the  true  physician 
must  minister  to  the  whole  man  if  he  is  to 
accomplish  his  best  work.  Nor  is  this  de- 
duction founded  upon  abstract  argument, 
but  upon  concrete  proof.  Admitting  as  we 
must  that  prevention  is  better  than  cure, 
my  own  experience  teaches  me  that  the 
Christian  faith  has  succeeded  in  eliminat- 
ing causes  of  disease  by  stimulating  people 
to  adopt  the  provisions  of  preventive 
medicine.  It  is  conceded  that  the  greater 
number  of  bodily  ailments  are  avoidable 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      51 

and  due  to  preventable  causes;  and  that 
the  real  contagion  that  produces  many 
diseases  is  evil  spiritual  influences,  such  as 
feeble  wills,  together  with  evil  companion- 
ship and  bad  environment.  It  does  not 
take  special  knowledge  or  apparatus  to 
discern  this  fact. 

Lawyers  and  clergy,  as  well  as  doctors, 
know  the  endless  evils  to  which  alcohol 
leads.  True,  they  may  not  attribute  di- 
rectly to  it  the  subtle  sclerosis  of  liver  and 
kidney  and  brain,  the  hard  artery,  the  fat 
and  generally  degenerate  body.  But  they 
see  the  poverty,  starvation,  cruelty,  ac- 
cidents, and  injuries  to  which  it  leads.  This 
is  just  as  true  of  the  sexual  and  social  vices. 
They  see  the  provisions  that  society  makes 
to  pander  to  them,  the  red-Hght  districts, 
the  ruined  girls,  the  debased  men.  But 
they  do  not,  as  we  do,  see  young  wives  most 
literally  murdered,  blighted  and  miserable 
children,  and  the  evident  results  in  re- 
ducing vitality,  making  people  incapable 
of  withstanding  disease  or  responding  to 


52  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

surgical  help,  or  in  producing  cancer  or  in- 
sanity. This  is  no  less  true  in  the  case  of  the 
other  great  enemy  of  our  race,  tuberculo- 
sis. 

If  the  employers  of  labor  were  Christian 
men  following  Christ,  labor  would  receive 
fairer  reward,  workmen  would  be  better 
housed  and  able  to  provide  more  healthful 
conditions  for  their  families.  Cleanliness, 
ventilation,  and  sanitation  would  be  made 
easy  instead  of  almost  impossible.  It  would 
seem  that  the  physician  might  well  object 
to  the  ideal  Christian  conditions.  Surely 
Christ-following  is  my  worst  enemy,  for 
there  will  be  no  room  for  me  in  a  really 
Christian  community,  when  tuberculosis, 
sclerosis,  typhoid  and  social  evils  are  eradi- 
cated. In  the  City  Beautiful  of  the  Christian 
vision  it  is  said  there  shall  be  no  more  sick- 
ness or  suffering  or  death.  Unless  the  call- 
ing of  the  physician  is  a  mere  isolated  fac- 
tor, disjointedly  cast  into  a  hotch-potch 
of  a  universe  without  definite  aims  and 
views,  this  must  be  the  ideal  he  wishes  to 


CHRIST  AND  THE  ESHDIVroUAL      53 

attain.  If  he  does  not  believe  it  is  ever 
realizable,  and  yet  thinks  of  it  at  all,  his 
only  alternative  is  insanity. 

The  answer  is  simple.  It  is  this  that  is  the 
glory  of  our  profession,  namely,  that,  work- 
ing in  the  spirit  of  the  Master,  it  must 
evolve,  its  keynote  being  self-elimination. 
It  has  cleared  the  Panama  of  yellow  fever; 
it  has  banished  typhus  and  plague  and 
black  death,  and  almost  eradicated  small- 
pox, diphtheria,  and  malaria;  it  has  broken 
the  back  of  cerebro-spinal  meningitis  and 
sleeping  sickness,  and  many  other  ills  of 
the  flesh.  The  world  does  acclaim  that  the 
doctor  is  the  best  missionary  if  only  he 
has  the  vision  and  follows  it.  I  heard  Sir 
Frederic  Treves,  the  famous  surgeon,  aptly 
say,  "Medicine  is  the  best  education  in  the 
world,  yet  it  seems  the  worst  profession  to 
follow."  Because,  while  it  gives  men  in- 
finite power,  incomparable  opportunities, 
when  competition  from  overcrowding  of 
the  profession  arises  it  leads  to  such  awful 
temptations.    A  selfish  politician,  lawyer. 


54  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

clergyman,  or  merchant  has  not  quite  the 
same  power  over  flesh  and  blood,  and  does 
not  depend  so  directly  upon  other  people's 
misfortunes  for  his  income.  But  it  was  the 
Master's  profession,  if  he  had  a  special  one, 
and  to  me  it  calls  as  loudly  for  men  of  his 
mind  and  life,  with  the  true  Christ-following 
faith,  as  ever  it  did,  and  as  insistently.  It 
still  calls  for  men  endued  with  the  power 
that  comes  from  on  high,  as  well  as  with 
an  up-to-date  knowledge  of  surgical  pro- 
cedure, and  fully  sympathetic  with  the 
desire  which  made  Paul  say,  "I  am  eager 
to  tell  the  good  news,  since  faith  is  the 
power  by  which  God  brings  salvation." 

To  be  more  concrete  for  a  moment,  I  would 
state  that  the  whole  stress  of  the  modern 
view  of  medicine  is  that  fresh  air,  pure  food, 
more  hours  of  rest,  better  playgrounds,  and 
schools  and  garden  villages  are  a  more 
remunerative  investment  from  a  medical 
point  of  view  than  an  enlarged  pharma- 
copoeia. The  use  of  drugs  seems  to  be  falling 
more  and  more  into  unprofessional  hands, 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVmUAL      55 

and  I  doubt  very  much  if  the  unquahfied 
chemist  and  patent-medicine  vendor  are 
not  far  the  firmest  behevers  in  them.  Of 
course  there  are  valuable  drugs,  and  natur- 
ally the  physician  should  know  best  how 
to  handle  them.  But  often  enough  he  gets 
into  a  routine,  and  it  has  been  said  that 
the  average  doctor  never  uses  more  than  a 
dozen  diflferent  prescriptions,  and  those  no 
longer  contain  a  dozen  ingredients  each. 
I  asked  a  world-famous  surgeon  the  other 
day  what  he  used  if  he  sprained  his  own 
ankle.  He  named  a  well-known  patent 
liniment;  for  an  irritable  cut  or  scratch  he 
used  a  patent  ointment;  for  a  digestive 
trouble,  a  famous  patent  pill. 

On  the  other  hand,  who  to-day  doubts 
the  intimate  correlation  between  health  of 
mind  and  of  body,  or  the  mutual  inter- 
relation and  dependency  of  both  of  these 
with  the  soul,  which  expresses  itself  through 
them.  Take  for  instance  the  nervous  in- 
stability that  results  from  the  high  pres- 
sure of  modern  life.    What  an  enormous 


56  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

factor  it  forms  in  the  category  of  sicknesses. 
The  records  of  every  member  of  om-  pro- 
fession well  confirm  the  statement  that  a 
large  proportion  among  our  cases  consists 
of  neurosis,  neurasthenia,  nervous  prostra- 
tion, and  so-called  functional  and  idio- 
pathic disorders  dependent  upon  causes 
the  nature  of  which  we  cannot  identify 
under  the  microscope,  but  which  we  think 
are  due  to  brain-cell  instability.  What  a 
long  step  toward  the  millennial  conditions 
will  be  covered  when  these  disturbances 
can  be  banished. 

Once  in  a  clergyman's  ^  study  before 
morning  service  I  noticed  on  his  table  a  pile 
of  unopened  letters  quite  a  foot  in  height. 
"Why  don't  you  open  your  letters?"  I 
asked.  —  "Those  all  came  this  morning," 
was  the  reply.  —  "They  are  all  from  people 
wanting  help  or  money?"  —  "No,  mostly 
for  nervous  disorders  and  such  troubles."  — 
"  I  wish  you  would  give  me  an  example."  — 
"Well,  here  is  one.    This  young  man  has 

*  Dr.  Elwood  Worcester,  Emmanuel  Church,  Boston. 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      57 

been  to  no  less  than  three  doctors,  and 
in  one  hospital,  for  subjective  stomach 
troubles.  They  found  no  cause  they  could 
remove.  We  discovered  he  had  a  burden  on 
his  mind,  which  he  could  n't  get  rid  of.  It 
prevented  his  sleeping.  We  found  we  could 
help  him,  and  he  has  lost  all  his  pains." 

One  day  while  I  was  attending  Dr.  Bar- 
ker's clinic  at  Johns  Hopkins,  the  first  pa- 
tient brought  into  the  theatre  gave  much 
the  following  history.  He  had  had  nose 
trouble,  went  to  a  specialist  and  had  his 
adenoids  removed;  got  throat  trouble,  and 
had  his  tonsils  out;  got  bladder  trouble, 
and  had  his  prostate  removed;  got  an  ob- 
scure pain  in  his  abdomen,  and  had  his 
appendix  out;  had  headaches  and  pain 
in  the  eyes,  went  to  an  eye  specialist  and 
got  glasses.  Altogether  this  was  the  tenth 
clinic  he  had  experienced.  On  entering 
the  very  room  in  which  we  sat  we  had  heard 
the  sound  of  the  builders  of  an  enormous 
new  wing  to  the  hospital,  for  which  millions 
of  dollars  had  been  given.   Dr.  Barker  ex- 


58  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

plained  to  his  classes,  as  soon  as  the  patient 
had  gone  out,  that  in  all  probability  this 
new  psychiatric  hospital  might  have  saved 
this  unfortunate  gentleman  some  of  his 
organs.  It  is  quite  an  error  to  suppose  that 
specialization  and  limitation  of  a  surgeon's 
field  always  marks  the  advance  of  scienti- 
fic treatment.  On  the  contrary,  in  ancient 
Rome  there  were  specialists  on  diseases 
of  the  eyelashes.  I  presume  if  they  could 
have  made  a  living  they  would  have 
specialized  on  one  eyelash.  That  a  germ, 
a  poison,  a  fee;  or  an  injury,  a  knife,  a  clean 
scar,  should  describe  the  whole  role  of  the 
doctor,  is  untenable. 

At  the  beginning  of  this  lecture  I  sug- 
gested that  prejudice  against  lay  inter- 
ference is  as  characteristic  of  our  profes- 
sion as  of  any  other.  We  certainly  believe, 
and  every  now  and  again  state,  that  there 
is  no  "hinterland"  containing  remedial 
methods  of  demonstrable  value  outside  our 
own  field,  though  our  aslyums  for  the  in- 
sane plainly  show  us  that  no  one  is  so  in- 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVTOUAL      59 

conceivably  certain  he  is  right,  and  knows 
it  all,  as  the  person  of  unsound  mind.  It 
is  lamentable  but  true  that  we  have  to  con- 
fess this,  though  that  is  better  than  that 
we  should  have  to  learn  that  there  is  some 
value  in  the  statement  from  outsiders  like 
Bernard  Shaw. 

Recently  the  English  papers  have  been 
full  of  a  lawsuit  against  a  well-known  mani- 
pulator of  joints  and  bones  in  London.  This 
man,  though  without  a  professional  degree, 
has  for  years,  according  to  the  evidence  of 
his  numerous  patients  among  the  rich  and 
educated,  been  effecting  cures  of  joint 
troubles.  A  patient  with  an  incurable  knee 
trouble  who  went  to  him  endeavored  sub- 
sequently to  get  money  out  of  him,  alleging 
malpractice.  The  hostility  and  generally 
unfair  attitude  of  the  doctors  who  were 
called  in  as  witnesses  evoked  a  most  con- 
vincing and  scathing  article  in  a  magazine, 
from  one  of  the  most  famous  of  the  English 
surgeons,  enumerating  cases  that  he  had 
himself  been  unable  to  relieve  and  which 


60  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

had  been  greatly  benefited  when  he  sent 
them  to  the  defendant.  He  clearly  proved 
that  the  man  knew  and  used  methods 
which  we  ought  to  adopt  as  being  superior 
to  our  own.  It  so  happened  that  one  of  my 
friends  in  India  whose  polo  pony  fell  upon 
him  had  an  exactly  similar  experience  with 
this  very  bonesetter.  While  I  believe  pa- 
tent remedies  as  a  rule  are  used  in  inverse 
proportion  to  the  intelligence  of  the  people, 
I  claim  that  humility  rather  than  arro- 
gance is  the  best  attribute  of  the  physician, 
and  that  more  faith  in  powers  outside  him- 
self is  justifiable  and  desirable.  Osteopathy, 
Eddyism,  Dowieism,  faith-healing,  opto- 
logy,  and  all  extreme  swings  of  the  pen- 
dulum of  protest,  afford  evidence  of  the 
desirability  of  the  larger  view  for  which  I 
am  pleading.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the 
physical  value  of  a  peaceful  mind.  Yet 
it  almost  cost  Mesmer  his  reputation  and 
his  life  when  he  suggested  that  mind  could 
be  made  a  remedy  for  bodily  ailments. 
Morton,    the    unfortunate    introducer    of 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      61 

ether,  fared  even  worse.  Harvey,  the  dis- 
coverer of  the  circulation  of  the  blood,  met 
a  similar  fate.  Lister  did  not  escape  bitter 
attacks  when  he  discovered  antiseptics. 
Whole  societies  have  come  into  existence 
to  discredit  the  work  of  men  like  Jenner, 
Pasteur,  and  other  incomparable  benefac- 
tors of  our  race,  while  no  available  means 
are  to-day  neglected  to  prevent  the  oppor- 
tunity of  acquiring  new  truths  by  experi- 
ments on  animals;  to  minimize  the  value 
of  the  results  achieved,  or  even  to  injure 
the  personal  reputation  of  those  who  are 
humane  enough  to  endure  being  so  greatly 
misunderstood  in  order  to  minister  to  man- 
kind. 

It  cost  Paul  much  suflfering  and  eventu- 
ally death  to  advocate  at  Rome  faith  in 
the  Christ  as  the  means  of  a  man's  salva- 
tion. The  same  preaching  of  the  same  Gos- 
pel, interpreted  in  terms  of  our  modern 
view  of  what  Christianity  means,  its  ap- 
plicability to  the  whole  man,  has,  to  my 
knowledge,  cost  more  than  one  good  man 


62  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

almost  as  bitter  an  experience  of  hostility 
in  the  United  States  of  America;  for  I 
question  if  words  do  not  hurt  as  much  as 
stones  and  whips,  in  these  days  when  the 
advance  of  civilization  has  made  us  "more 
sensitive  to  and  more  capable  of  suffering." 
The  preacher  of  to-day  is  saying  that  not 
only  are  physical  remedies  called  for,  not 
only  are  mental  suggestions  needed,  but 
that  we  must  ourselves  be  channels  of  the 
higher  life,  through  which  spiritual  streams 
from  the  Power  above  us  must  come  forth, 
if  we  are  to  contribute  our  best  service 
to  our  fellow  men.  In  this  latter  point  we 
rejoice  that  he  is  beginning  to  overtake 
George  Fox,  who  preached  the  same  mes- 
sage three  hundred  years  ago.  We  must 
consciously  reach  up  our  trolley  arm,  that 
contact  with  the  Power  above  may  give  us 
an  impetus  which  we  cannot  have  of  our- 
selves. 

The  value  of  mental  suggestion  has  been 
greatly  impressed  upon  me  by  many  cases 
in  my  own  experience.    The  following  will 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      63 

serve  as  an  example.  While  the  guest  of  a 
doctor  in  Montreal  I  was  much  interested 
by  his  experiments  in  alcoholic  cases  with 
chloride  of  gold,  which  I  had  always  thought 
to  be  an  inert  drug.  A  whole  series  of  cases 
of  ordinary  alcoholism  and  of  paroxysmal 
dipsomania  were  successfully  treated,  many 
of  which  had  defied  all  former  efforts.  One 
specially  interesting  case  was  that  of  a 
cook  who  for  over  forty  years  had  been  a 
chronic  rather  than  a  periodic  drunkard. 
She  was  savagely  drunk  when  she  came  to 
the  surgery,  and  a  better  impersonation  of 
our  vague  idea  of  the  Devil  I  have  never 
seen.  She  was  immediately  injected  with 
gold  chloride  and  told  she  could  drink  all 
the  whiskey  she  liked,  but  that  soon  she 
would  n't  care  for  it.  She  came  again  next 
day  and  was  admitted  to  a  private  ward 
for  a  few  days'  rest  and  upbuilding.  She 
was  again  injected  and  told  to  go  on  drink- 
ing the  liquor,  which  was  actually  poured 
out  and  put  in  a  glass  on  the  table  beside 
her  bed.   She  was  also  told  not  to  drink  it 


64  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

if  she  did  n't  like  it,  since  now  that  she  had 
been  given  the  drug  the  Hquor  would  make 
her  sick.  I  went  in  to  see  her  that  evening. 
The  whiskey  on  the  table  was  untouched. 
She  made  a  good  recovery  and  returned  to 
her  occupation.  I  not  only  purchased  the 
drugs  and  outfit,  and  tried  them,  but  sent 
the  directions  to  a  well-known  London 
physician  to  try  also;  but  in  our  hands  the 
system  failed.  Some  years  later  the  Mon- 
treal doctor,  who  was  to  read  a  paper  on 
the  subject  before  the  medical  society  there, 
wired  me  to  come  and  testify  to  the  authen- 
ticity of  some  of  his  cures,  as  he  feared  the 
society  was  hostile  to  him.  He  read  his  care- 
fully prepared  paper,  and  narrated  case 
after  case.  Afterwards,  I  gave  my  con- 
firmatory evidence.  The  president  said, 
and  the  meeting  indorsed  the  statement, 
that  chloride  of  gold  in  their  hands  was 
as  useless  as  water,  but  none  of  them  for 
one  moment  doubted  that  in  the  hands  of 
the  author  it  was  perfectly  successful. 
Recently  Lord  Mount  Stephen  gave  a 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      65 

large  share  of  his  immense  wealth  away  to 
his  heirs  and  friends,  that  in  his  Kfe  he 
might  have  the  real  joy  of  sharing  it  with 
others. 

"...  For  if  our  virtues 
Did  not  go  forth  of  us,  't  were  all  alike 
As  if  we  had  them  not."  ^ 

A  doctor's  joys,  no  more  than  his  success, 
can  be  estimated  by  the  size  of  his  fees,  or 
what  he  gets  out  of  his  profession,  but  only 
by  what  he  contributes  to  it.  That  "he 
who  will  be  greatest  must  be  the  servant  of 
all "  is  certainly  true  of  this  ministry.  This 
is  surely  what  the  lawyer  and  the  clergy- 
man and  the  doctor  desire :  the  conversion 
of  the  aims  and  efforts  of  the  mind,  the  body, 
and  the  soul.  When  this  is  realized,  a  man 
may  say,  "I  am  a  living  factor  in  the  cre- 
ative purpose,  and  fidelity  in  my  place  is 
the  test  of  the  effectiveness  of  the  whole 
design.  This  unity  of  the  world  saves  some 
men  from  the  conceit  of  wisdom,  as  it  saves 
others  from  the  despondency  of  work." 

1  Measure  for  Measure,  i,  i,  34-36. 


66  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

To  refer  to  the  value  of  ministering  to 
the  whole  man  and  not  to  connect  it  with 
the  name  of  Dr.  Richard  Cabot  were  im- 
possible. While  approaching  it  from  an- 
other point  of  view,  the  world  is  learning 
to  look  upon  him  as  chief  apostle  of  the  need 
for  this  all-inclusive  ministry. 

Myers  has  said  that  when  it  is  a  ques- 
tion of  inquiring  into  whether  mind  acts 
on  mind  without  the  body,  savants  can- 
not, and  theologians  will  not,  accept  evi- 
dence. But  while  there  may  be  much  truth 
in  satirizing  many  preachers  as  Stigginses, 
I  am  convinced  that  it  is  not  the  whole 
truth,  any  more  than  that  there  is  no  truth 
in  the  subliminal  self. 

To  turn  now  to  the  second  division  of 
our  lecture,  the  profession  of  the  law.  I 
almost  fear  to  tread  on  that  ground.  Though 
acting  as  a  magistrate  for  over  ten  years, 
I  am  obliged  to  confess  that  I  have  been 
unhampered  by  any  special  knowledge  of 
the  technicalities  of  the  profession,  and 
as  a  medical  exponent  I  have  naturally 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVmUAL      67 

had  a  remedial  and  not  a  retributive 
bias. 

Surely,  the  true  lawyer's  ideal  is  not  a 
crime,  a  retribution,  a  fee,  though  he  too 
is  tempted  to  keep  so  close  to  the  mill  which 
grinds  out  dollars  that  he  may  lose  the  full 
vision  of  his  potentiality.  Christ  as  a  law- 
yer would,  exactly  as  if  a  doctor,  be  work- 
ing for  big  and  worthy  ends,  —  to  produce 
conditions  that  would  abolish  crime,  —  and 
so  unselfishly  working  for  the  elimination 
of  his  own  profession.  To  me  it  seems  just 
as  certain  that  if  the  true  physician  must 
treat  the  whole  man,  if  he  is  to  cure  phys- 
ical ailments,  so  moral  obliquities  demand 
the  same  treatment  of  the  true  lawyer.  That 
disease  leads  to  sin  and  crime  is  quite  as 
true  as  that  sin  and  crime  lead  to  disease. 
A  man  in  the  full  flush  of  health  and  in  good 
surroundings  is  less  likely  to  become  a 
criminal  than  a  weakling  in  a  bad  environ- 
ment. 

One  of  our  first  pieces  of  work  among  the 
fishermen  was  to  oust  the  floating  grogshops 


68  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

from  the  fishing  fleet,  by  supplying  vessels 
in  their  midst  which  made  provision  for  all 
their  legitimate  demands:  such  as  cheap 
tobacco,  social  opportunities,  and  simple 
religious  teaching,  but  not  alcoholic  liquors. 
This  policy  so  commended  itself  to  the 
magistrates  of  the  fishing  seaports,  that 
we  hold  their  written  and  unasked  testi- 
monials to  the  lessening  of  crime  and  even 
the  reduction  of  police  forces  in  the  fisher- 
men's quarters,  and  the  diminution  of 
poverty  and  the  need  of  poor-relief.  Event- 
ually the  results  seemed  so  desirable  to 
conservative  governments  bordering  the 
German  Ocean  that  they  agreed  to  an  in- 
ternational convention.  It  favored  and 
enforced  the  most  severe  laws  against  sell- 
ing any  liquors  on  the  high  seas,  on  the  sole 
ground  that  if  their  environment  was  im- 
proved, the  lives  of  the  people  would  also 
be  improved,  a  deduction  fully  indorsed  by 
the  results  founded  on  the  experimental, 
the  best  of  all  bases.  The  same  principle 
obtained  on  the  shore  when  we  supplied 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVmUAL      69 

institutes  belonging  to  the  fishermen,  and 
had  laws  passed  to  prevent  wages  being 
paid  in  saloons  or  annexes  thereto.  The 
same  results  accrued  in  Labrador  and  North 
Newfoundland  when  the  sale  of  liquor  was 
prohibited  in  a  region  where  such  a  law 
could  be  enforced.  The  aged  mayor  of 
Portland,  Maine,  near  the  close  of  a  most 
successful  business  career,  told  me  that 
though  the  liquor  traflSc,  almost  all-power- 
ful, had  done  its  best  to  make  the  prohib- 
ition laws  ineffective,  and  to  falsify  their 
results,  crime  had  unquestionably  been 
lessened. 

The  absence  of  the  environment  of  the 
open  saloon  and  flaunting  windows,  and 
the  nameless  crimes  connected  with  that 
traffic,  are  alike  dependent  largely  on  the 
prevention  of  the  sale  of  intoxicants.  The 
celebrated  Judge  Altgeld,  when  governor 
of  Illinois,  stated  pithily  that  ninety-five 
per  cent  of  crimes  of  violence  and  burglary 
were  due  to  the  same  cause  (alcohol).  To 
my  mind  part  of  the  privilege  of  the  life- 


70  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

work  of  the  Christian  lawyer  is  to  help  to 
improve  the  environment  of  the  tempted 
classes.  To  see  justice  impartially  admin- 
istered is  of  course  his  supreme  special 
function;  and  there  again  he  has  the  same 
opportunities  as  the  doctor  for  the  real  joys 
of  personal  service  to  the  oppressed,  and  for 
righting  the  wrongs  of  the  injured.  But 
would  any  worthy  member  of  the  bar  con- 
tend that  therewith  ended  the  function  of 
the  true  lawyer;  that  to  exact  retribution, 
to  deter  evildoers  by  threats,  or  even  to 
get  justice  for  those  in  trouble,  made  a 
great  lawyer  .^^  Such  a  course  might  make 
him  a  rich  lawyer,  a  popular  lawyer,  but 
would  not  make  him  great.  To  render 
crime  unattractive,  to  implant  new  as- 
pirations, to  regenerate  the  individual,  and 
to  make  laws  remedial,  are  surely  truer 
claims  to  immortality. 

The  laws  have  been  framed  by  the  pow- 
erful of  a  generation  gone,  and  naturally 
leave  us  a  heritage  that  demands  remodel- 
ing if  it  is  to  meet  the  needs  of  a  new  era. 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      71 

Why  should  men  hesitate  to  apply  the 
same  test  to  the  dogmas  of  the  churches, 
which  are  the  outgrowths  of  despotism, 
and  not  applicable  to  a  true  democracy  as 
are  its  teachings?  A  real  human  sympathy 
with  the  life  of  to-day  shows  that  there 
is  infinite  opportunity  for  simplifying  the 
processes  of  the  law,  if  it  is  to  express  our 
views  of  Christ's  ideal  of  brotherhood,  or 
even  to  give  the  poor  man  a  chance  of  get- 
ting justice  or  to  make  the  rich  man  fear 
punishment. 

While  working  eight  years  in  the  purlieus 
of  Whitechapel,  I  learned  beyond  all  ques- 
tion, first,  that  often  all  the  punishments 
invented  by  the  law  and  all  the  provisions 
made  for  the  protection  of  life  and  pro- 
perty failed  in  many  cases;  and  further,  I 
saw,  as  I  have  seen  since  that  time,  that 
the  very  men  whom  the  punishments  only 
made  worse  were  perfectly  capable  of  re- 
formation. Intelligent  sympathy  and  prac- 
tical love  cure  individuals  who  have  been 
pronounced  incurable  —  the  very  methods 


72  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

the  Master  advocated  and  calls  for  still. 
Among  such  translations  of  love  is  the 
administration  of  the  new  kind  of  prisons, 
such  as  that  of  the  Massachusetts  Reform- 
atory. Here  men  are  not  punished  again 
and  again  in  prison  for  little  or  big  breaches 
of  discipline,  but  are  simply  helped  not 
to  fail  by  offering  them  temptations  to 
be  good  and  by  rewards  for  success  in  the 
attempt.  Thus,  instead  of  insane  isolation 
and  brutalization,  making  men  revengeful 
and  despairing,  interesting  and  remunera- 
tive industries  are  taught  and  work  is  de- 
manded, —  good  solid  work,  a  temptation 
many  criminals  never  get  outside,  and  a 
gain,  as  they  never  had  a  chance  to  learn 
any  craft  before.  More  important  still, 
good  work  is  immediately  made  remunera- 
tive. Decorations,  such  as  good  conduct 
stripes,  are  displayed  on  the  uniforms,  and 
each  new  one  means  a  shortened  sentence. 
Responsibility  and  trust  are  gradually 
given  them,  and  self-respect,  hope,  and 
aspiration  induced  and  encouraged;  pride 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      73 

and  even  esprit  de  corps  are  cultivated,  — 
though  as  yet  there  are  no  inter-reforma- 
tory athletic  contests,  so  far  as  I  know! 

There  are  plenty  of  people,  however, 
who  still  maintain  "once  a  criminal,  al- 
ways a  criminal."  There  are  many  ever 
ready  to  condemn  to  the  pathologically  in- 
curable class,  those  who  often  enough  are 
only  the  victims  of  circumstance.  The  Mas- 
ter never  was  among  these  critics.  He 
was  ever  the  world's  apostle  of  optimism 
and  of  hope.  The  amazing  records  of  this 
Reformatory  show  that  seventy-five  per 
cent  of  these  poor  fellows  are  cured;  of  the 
remainder,  fifteen  per  cent  being  physical 
degenerates.  I  say  poor  fellows,  for  my 
view  is  that  they  are  to  be  pitied,  if  only 
because  of  the  hell  on  earth  which  they 
make  for  themselves,  and  the  loss  of  ca- 
pacity and  the  vision  of  what  God  intended 
them  to  be.  But  unless  we  have  a  vision 
ourselves  of  the  true  greatness  of  our  op- 
portunity, we  can  hardly  expect  to  sympa- 
thize with  them  for  their  blindness. 


74  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

It  is  not  the  intellectual  faculties  to 
which  Christianity  seeks  to  supply  new 
information,  but  it  is  the  heart  that  it  is 
necessary  to  reach.  The  Master  always 
taught  that  the  renewal  and  perfecting  of 
a  man  was  dependent  upon  a  new  heart,  and 
no  one  has  improved  on  that  treatment  that 
I  know  of.  The  efforts  of  the  conventional, 
perfunctory  religious  teacher,  hke  those  of 
the  sloppy  and  shallow  pietist,  remind  me 
strongly  of  such  drugs  as  tartarated  anti- 
mony. If  rightly  given,  the  desired  result 
is  obtained,  but  if  wrongly,  it  is  promptly 
rejected.  It  is  not  religiosity  or  intellec- 
tualism,  but  love,  that  is  needed.  I  claim 
that  the  great  lawyer  will  be  as  eager  as 
any  specialist  in  talking,  to  translate  wisely, 
into  permanent  effective  methods  for  re- 
clamation, the  true  religion,  namely,  the 
love  that  saves. 

Dr.  Richard  Cabot  and  others  in  medi- 
cine. Dr.  Elwood  Worcester  and  other 
clergy,  have  accepted  and  eloquently 
taught  by  example  and  precept  the  neces- 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      75 

sity  and  the  privilege  in  their  two  profes- 
sions of  considering  causally  and  remedially 
the  family  and  the  immediate  home  sur- 
roundings of  those  they  are  endeavoring 
to  help.  Of  course  a  great  deal  of  a  law- 
yer's work  does  not  permit  any  such  oppor- 
tunity, yet  I  feel  that  the  Master  himself 
as  a  lawyer  to-day  would  find  chances  to 
exercise  the  same  spirit.  ^Etiology  and 
pathology,  sociology  and  theology,  have 
found  a  parallel  in  the  study  of  criminology 
which  is  evidence  of  the  opening  of  fresh 
and  glorious  channels  for  life  energies  in 
the  sister  profession  of  the  law.  So  young 
is  it,  however,  that  the  Italian  Lombroso, 
who  is  considered  the  parent  of  it,  is  still 
living  in  Italy.  Germany  has  developed 
the  study,  and  Professor  Wigmore  of 
Chicago  is  responsible  for  a  society  and  a 
journal  of  criminology  of  Illinois. 

In  the  amusing  comic  opera,  the  "Mi- 
kado," a  verse  of  song  runs:  — 

"My  object  all  sublime 
I  shall  achieve  in  time. 


76  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

To  make  the  punishment  fit  the  crime. 
The  punishment  fit  the  crime." 

Yet  what  an  ideal  service,  what  a  real  suc- 
cess and  joy  the  universal  accomplishment 
or  even  serious  effort  toward  its  fulfillment 
would  be,  working  in  the  Master's  spirit 
of  love  for  the  man  and  hatred  for  the  sin. 
That  would  imply  that  success  in  the  effort 
spelled  new  men  out  of  old,  though  science 
and  evolution  call  the  criminals  hopeless. 
The  real  object  of  the  lawyer's  life  can 
be  attained  only  by  offering  his  quota, 
infinitesimal  though  it  be;  but  he  can 
contribute  it  by  reincarnating  the  spirit 
of  the  Master. 

I  would  inquire  here  in  what  possible 
way  the  achievement  of  this  glorious  and 
ultimate  end  can  be  materially  influenced 
by  the  lawyer's  mere  mental  apprehension 
of  or  submission  to  subtle  theologic  dogmas 
or  refinements  in  the  precise  method  of  ex- 
pressing his  devotion  to  God.  What  con- 
nection have  such  things,  'per  se,  with  real 
religion?   They  may  help  his  religion,  but 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      77 

they  are  not  it.  Plain,  common  courage 
has  much  more  influence  than  intellectual 
attitude.  Heney,  who  in  the  face  of  almost 
every  pessimist  on  earth,  in  the  face  of  ap- 
palling difficulties  and  opposition,  in  the 
face  of  persecution  and  attempted  murder, 
sent  the  great  civic  burglars  in  San  Fran- 
cisco to  jail,  preached  a  gospel  in  the  true 
spirit  of  the  Christ.  For  a  poor  Carpenter 
to  stand  alone  before  the  powers  that  be, 
knowing  that  no  protection  was  afforded 
life  by  the  law  of  his  day,  and  say  publicly, 
"You  generation  of  vipers!  How  can  you 
escape  the  damnation  of  hell?"  required 
courage,  not  theology.  The  cross  of  Christ 
calls  for  intelligent  courage  and  not  intellec- 
tual effacement  and  mere  ability  to  swal- 
low. When  Heney  went  back  after  scarcely 
recovering  from  his  wounds,  and  faced  the 
court,  and  again,  after  two  mistrials,  com- 
menced a  third,  he,  a  volunteer,  unpaid 
in  dollars,  fighting  almost  as  a  lone  man 
against  the  immeasurable  burden  of  hatred 
and  opposition,  to  me  presented  at  least 


78  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

one  aspect  of  the  truly  great  Christian 
lawyer. 

What  is  a  corporation  lawyer  to  do,  you 
say,  when  possibly  his  very  living  depends 
upon  his  winning  a  technicality  for  the 
bosses  against  equity  for  the  community. 
Abraham  Lincoln  would  not  take  cases 
when  he  knew  his  side  was  in  the  wrong, 
and  that  winning  meant  doing  a  wrong. 
To  connive  at  the  defeat  of  justice  is  to 
prostitute  a  holy  duty.  That's  all;  you 
must  be  brave  if  you  are  to  have  courage. 
You  must  take  adverse  chances  if  you  are 
to  be  a  hero.  It  is  simply  a  question  of 
what  you  seek  in  life.  The  purely  imper- 
sonal position  of  the  lawyer  of  course  is  the 
easiest  path,  exactly  as  it  is  for  the  doctor 
who  asks,  as  Cabot  says,  "What  is  in  the 
waiting-room?  Anything  of  interest.?"  I 
acknowledge  that  to  sympathize  with  each 
case  is  difficult;  it  makes  a  claim  on  a  law- 
yer which  must  ciu*tail  his  practice.  But  he 
is  doing  what  he  would  like  done  for  him 
were  he  the  client.    And  I  am  contending 


CHRIST  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL      79 

that  it  is  possible,  and  constitutes  the  true 
scale  by  which  to  measure  greatness,  and 
is  what  the  Master  would  give,  and  what 
faith  in  him  calls  for. 

Although  owing  to  lack  of  time  I  have 
been  unable  to  touch  upon  the  three  types 
of  mind  into  which  it  would  appear  one 
might  divide  men,  — the  scientific,  the  lit- 
erary, and  the  practical,  —  still  I  maintain 
that  one  principle  applies  to  all.  "But  Jesus 
does  not  classify  people.  He  gathers  up  the 
different  types  of  human  life  into  one  com- 
prehensive unity  of  discipleship."  ^  In 
discussing  the  doctor  and  the  lawyer  I  be- 
lieve that  I  have  in  substance  demonstrated 
the  working-out  of  the  Christian  ideal, 
whatever  the  category  into  which  a  man 
may  fall.  "There  is  no  activity  of  man 
which  may  not  be  the  door,  and  into  which 
and  through  which  cannot  enter  that  power 
of  God  which  makes  the  man  indeed  to  be 
God's  servant."  ^ 

1  Paradise,  The  Church  and  the  Individual, 

2  Phillips  Brooks. 


LECTURE  III 

CHRIST  AND   SOCIETY 

"Granted  the  reality  of  religion,  what  is 
its  contribution  to  modern  life?"  I  have 
already  warned  you  that  my  idea  in  these 
lectures  is  to  defend  the  rationality  and 
value  of  faith  in  Christ  on  the  iDasis  of  my 
own  physical,  mental,  and  spiritual  experi- 
ences. I  do  not  pretend  that  I  possess 
scientific  acquaintance  with  our  peculiar 
social  conditions,  nor  do  I  claim  to  have 
any  special  expert  knowledge  of  the  most 
successful  ways  of  improving  them.  The 
world  is  just  learning  that  the  first  can  only 
be  gained  by  the  same  patient  study  we 
devote  to  medicine  or  law;  the  second,  I 
am  certain,  only  by  a  life  of  personal  de- 
votion. 

It  is  necessary  to  do,  not  merely  to  talk, 
if  we  are  to  know  the  truth  about  the  reme- 
dies for  life's  troubles  and  difficulties.  Still, 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  81 

with  Browning,  I  realize  that  "God  must 
be  gained  by  first  leap,"  and  the  object  of 
this  lecture  is  not  to  show  that  by  any 
intellectual  process  man  by  searching  can 
demonstrate  God,  but  only  that,  with  the 
advance  of  civilization,  there  is  not  a  less 
but  an  ever-increasing  need  for  what  real 
religion  has  to  contribute.  There  is  proof 
enough  of  this  on  every  hand  for  the  man 
who  is  willing  to  experiment,  to  justify  to 
his  own  mind  his  taking  that  leap,  for 
society's  benefit  if  not  for  his  own. 

One  thing  more  is  necessary  to  be  made 
clear  before  going  further,  and  that  is, 
what  do  we  mean  by  religion?  Byreligion,\ 
in  this  lecture,  I  mean  that  following  of  the  / 
Christ  which  is  a  daily  endeavor  to  inter- L 
prethis  teachings  by  translating  them  into  { 
action;  or,  in  other  words,  trying  to  do  whaty 
he  would  do  if  he  were  in  our  circumstances. 
If  you  were  a  housemaid,  that  would  re- 
quire you,  in  the  words  of  the  Salvation 
Army  hymn,   "to  dust  the  shelf  behind 
the  door";  or  if  you  were  a  king,  "just  to 


82  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

king  well,"  as  one  of  your  own  humorists 
suggests. 

Jesus  was  peculiar  among  religious  teach- 
ers in  being  "no  mere  speculative  philo- 
sopher," no  pure  scientist  for  science' 
sake.  He  was  not  of  the  type  of  Holmes's 
Scarabee.  I  always  think  of  him  as  the 
family  physician  of  the  human  race.  Re- 
ligion to  him  existed  for  the  purpose  of 
action;  it  was  valuable  solely  for  the  serv- 
ice of  mankind.  In  the  very  simplest 
language  he  tells  us,  not  what  God  would 
have  us  think,  but  what  God  would  have 
us  do;  putting  within  the  reach  of  our  daily 
life  that  which  not  only  spells  our  redemp- 
tion here  and  now,  but  also  enables  us 
to  be  redeemers  ourselves,  and  so  allows 
us  to  contribute  that  which  is  lasting  to 
modern  life.  Was  it  not  exactly  in  this 
faith  that  these  lectures  were  founded  .^^ 

Yet  religion  in  the  past  has  spent  far 
more  time  and  energy,  and  endured  far 
more  suffering  and  sacrifice  and  defeat,  in 
endeavoring  to  perpetuate  crystallized  intel- 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  83 

lectual  attitudes  and  man-advised  organ- 
izations, all  calling  themselves  "churches/* 
than  in  trying  to  reincarnate  the  life  of  the 
Master  in  their  own. 

A  few  years  ago  the  visible  churches 
awoke  to  the  fact  that  they  were  fast  be- 
coming what  is  known  as  "back  numbers"; 
and  that  the  profession  of  the  minister  of 
religion  was  in  danger  of  being  side-tracked. 
They  are  awake  now,  however,  and  on 
all  sides  they  are  olBFering  an  increasingly 
valuable  quota  to  modern  civilization. 
"Churches"  to  me  comprise  all  those  reli- 
gious institutions  which,  through  helping 
forward  the  reign  of  peace,  mercy,  and 
reverence,  induce  righteousness,  joy,  and 
peace,  which  is  the  Kingdom  of  God.  Christ 
himself  says  that  their  labels  do  not  count 
for  anything.  The  way  we  salute  our  gen- 
eral is  of  much  less  importance  than  the 
way  we  obey  him.  Victory  is  more  momen- 
tous than  tactics.  "Christian  men,"  to 
the  Master,  were  those  who  were  on  his 
side,  and  every  such  institution,  whether 


84  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

Protestant  or  Catholic,  Jewish  or  purely 
ethical,^is  directly  enriching  our  hfe  to- 
day. Nor  is  "the  state  merely  a  local  as- 
sociation existing  to  prevent  mutual  injury 
and  promote  universal  exchange.  .  .  .  The 
object  of  the  political  association  is  not 
merely  a  common  life,  but  noble  action," 
says  Aristotle.^ 

The  churches  are  awaking  to  the  fact  that 
the  state  can  and  must  be  "religious";  and 
that  just  in  proportion  as  an  institution 
has  no  creed,  its  religion  can  be  universal. 
Christ  himself  propounded  no  creed,  and 
all  the  churches  can  unite  on  those  lines 
which  call  for  no  special  creed,  but  merely 
for  the  recognition  of  man's  brotherhood, 
which  each  and  every  church  acknowledges. 
In  this  way  we  see  the  great  hope  of  their 
future  in  the  federation  of  churches  which 
is  everywhere  growing  up,  and  which  is 
striving  to  unite  all  their  ejfforts  for  the 
betterment  of  social  conditions. 

Let  us  take  now,  as  instances,  some  of  the 
*  Dr.  Lyman  Abbott,  Yak  Lectures, 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  85 

outgrowths  of  the  churches.  I  myself  have 
seen  enough  of  the  Young  Men's  Christian 
Association  and  Young  Women's  Christian 
Association  to  know  that,  with  their 
splendid  buildings  and  intelligent  work, 
they  are  materially  adding  to  the  comfort 
and  upUft  of  Hfe  of  tens  of  thousands,  nay, 
of  thousands  of  thousands,  not  only  in  this 
country,  but  the  whole  world  round.  They 
have  even  tried  to  make  war  comfortable. 
Apparently  it  narrows  the  limits  of  agencies 
to  have  to  give  examples  and  to  name  any 
particular  helpful  factors;  but  a  doctor  is 
impelled  to  illustrate  his  principles  by 
quoting  cases.  Thus,  again,  who  that 
knows  anything  of  Robert  College  and  its 
work,  which  helped  so  much  to  give  free- 
dom to  Turkey;  of  the  Beyrout  College 
and  its  magnificent  work  for  Syria  and  for 
the  Mohammedan  world  generally;  of  the 
colleges  in  India  which  have  shown  that, 
given  a  chance,  the  downtrodden  classes 
can  successfully  compete  with  the  highest 
castes;  of  the  huge  hospitals  in  China,  Ja- 


86  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

pan,  India,  and  the  Islands  of  the  Sea, — 
but  knows  perfectly  well  the  truth  that  the 
churches  are  contributing  liberally.  To  the 
nations  everywhere  Christianity  is  teach- 
ing the  real  value  of  human  life,  and  so, 
especially  in  the  East,  is  raising  the  whole 
aspiration  of  the  people  by  making  them 
understand  what  they  may  become.  This 
is  so  much  the  case  that  in  Japan  the 
wisest  scholars  have  declared  that  only 
in  Christianity  can  they  see  an  adequate 
basis  for  individual  and  national  life.  They 
make  this  statement  in  spite  of  the  facts 
of  the  liquor  and  opium  traffic  carried  on  by 
Christian  nations;  in  spite  of  anti-Christian 
travelers,  bad  officials,  the  selfishness  of 
so-called  governments,  and  the  fallibility 
of  missionaries  and  their  methods. 

To-day  there  is  so  much  prejudice  against 
the  title  "missionary"  that  many  people, 
apparently,  prefer  to  consider  their  lives 
purposeless  rather  than  to  admit  that 
"mission"  is  only  a  synonym  for  "life." 
We  must  remember  that  there  are  many 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  87 

failures  in  American  social  life,  and  yet 
here  also  are  many  lives  which  are  eflPect- 
ive  contributions  to  the  world's  economy. 
I  do  not  wish  to  weary  you  with  examples, 
but  my  interests  being  among  sailors  I 
might  here  testify  to  the  value  of  such 
splendid  institutes  as  that  of  your  Ameri- 
can Seaman's  Society,  recently  erected  in 
New  York;  to  the  similarly  efficient  but  less 
expensive  plants  here  in  Boston,  and  to  in- 
stitutions of  the  same  kind  scattered  all 
round  the  world.  These  all  give  men  who 
are  away  from  their  homes  a  warm  welcome, 
a  place  to  rest  and  play,  a  good  cheap  lodg- 
ing, and  a  safeguard  from  the  land-shark 
and  the  crimp.  Through  all  of  these  relig- 
ion is  making  a  serious  Christian  eflfort 
towards  the  solution  of  a  problem  which 
menaces  the  domestic  life  of  those  whose 
life-service  to  the  community  necessarily 
deprives  them  of  the  natural  protection 
and  help  of  their  own  homes.  To  me  this 
is  simply  paying  a  debt  to  those  to  whom 
the  cost  of  catching  our  fish  and  transport- 


88  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

ing  our  merchandise  is  often  only  to  be 
reckoned  in  "lives  of  men."  It  is  still  the 
privilege  of  religion  to  see  that  this  debt  is 
paid.  If  she  fails  to  do  so,  some  day  it  will 
be  recognized  by  the  men  themselves  as 
their  right,  and  their  own  unions  will  pro- 
vide it,  once  more  taking  from  the  church 
a  chance  to  justify  herself.  Nay,  more,  this 
will  anyhow  be  just  as  surely  the  case,  if 
into  the  church's  interpretation  of  relig- 
ion she  introduces  the  sense  of  patronage 
and  intellectual  superiority  which  have 
characterized  her  too  much  in  the  past,  and 
which  so  ill  become  her  as  a  servant  of  the 
Master. 

There  are  more  instances  than  one  of 
big  plants  of  this  kind,  just  suited  for  prac- 
tical messages  of  love,  being  totally  unsuc- 
cessful because  their  flavor  is  spoiled  by  a 
sense  of  the  "holier-than-thou"  arrogance. 
It  is  this  fact  that  makes  men  say  that  these 
efforts  do  little  more  than  touch  the  real 
problem.  Believe  me,  it  is  sadly  enough 
that  the  working  man  passes  the  building 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  89 

which  promises  exactly  what  he  needs.  If 
he  does  not  enter,  it  is  because  he  feels  that 
the  building  is  not  really  his.  Per  contray 
an  eminently  successful  eflFort  of  this  kind 
to  meet  the  needs  of  the  working  men  is 
Hollywood  Inn  at  Yonkers,  New  York.  It 
was  created  by  an  Episcopal  clergyman,* 
but  is  owned  and  run  by  the  men  them- 
selves. They  and  their  unions  all  find  a  home 
there,  as  do  their  clubs,  their  societies,  and 
their  friends.  It  is  theirs.  There  they  play 
what  games  they  like.  It  just  stands  for 
clean  games  without  gambling,  and  for 
drinks  without  alcohol.  No  public  worship 
or  preaching  is  considered  necessary.  It 
is  just  a  demonstration  of  love,  not  a  verbal 
message.  As  a  result  of  it,  Mr.  Freeman's 
church  found  a  thousand  new  commun- 
icant members,  because  he  preached  the 
undeniable  Gospel. 

Ten  thousand  other   practical  agencies 
are  ever  more  and  more  trying  to  do  things 

^  Rev.  James  Freeman,  now  of   St.  Mark's  Church, 
Minneapolis. 


90  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

in  Christ's  spirit,  and  these  are  forcing  the 
world  to  acknowledge  the  contribution  to 
life  which  religion  can  make.  The  increas- 
ing number  of  thoughtful  men  pouring 
out  of  our  colleges,  anxious  to  give  life 
and  intellect  and  money  to  the  service  of 
the  world,  is  itself  an  offering  which  no 
man  can  estimate  —  though  any  fool  can 
sneer  at  it.  The  growing  passion  for  serv- 
ice has  helped  as  many  to  work  at  home 
as  it  has  sent  out  for  that  purpose  to  for- 
eign fields. 

To  all  intents  and  purposes,  the  old  idea  of 
the  church  is  dying,  if  not  dead.  Thank 
God  if  it  is.  I  could  say  with  a  whole  heart, 
"The  Church  is  dead!  Long  live  the 
Church!" 

But  while  it  is  good  to  review  what  the 
churches  have  accomplished,  and  to  be 
able  to  derive  from  that  courage  and  zeal 
for  more  service,  the  fact  that  there  has 
been  some  success  must  be  used  only  to 
prove  to  us  that  we  can,  and  therefore 
miLsty  do  more.  It  is  from  the  lips  and  pens 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  91 

of  acknowledged  leaders  of  many  churches, 
and  from  those  who  have  given  the  most 
earnest  thought  to  the  subject,  that  we  learn 
that,  so  far  as  some  of  the  most  vital  is- 
sues of  modern  life  are  concerned,  the  visible 
churches  at  the  present  time  are  practically 
a  side  issue.  Most  assuredly  their  future 
existence  depends  upon  the  attitude  which 
they  now  adopt.  Other  agencies  outside 
all  the  communions  will,  if  they  fall  short, 
take  out  of  their  hands  the  only  functions 
which  they  can  find  to  occupy  their  ener- 
gies. 

Thus,  for  example,  at  one  time  the  church 
aflForded  all  the  educational  advantages. 
At  the  bar  of  public  opinion  she  was  found 
guilty  of  prostituting  that  sacred  office  for 
purely  party  purposes,  and  so  she  has 
forfeited  her  right  to  the  performance  of 
that  most  vital  function. 

Social  settlement  workers,  civic  leagues, 
rightly  administered  labor  unions  are  ad- 
vancing ends  which  righteousness  demands, 
and  which  the  churches  have  considered 


92  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

"outside  their  province."  As  if  they  could 
afford  to  be  silent,  or  sit  on  the  fence,  when 
any  question  affecting  the  vital  issues  of 
life  was  concerned.  Only  the  other  day 
here  in  Boston,  in  a  book  shop,  I  overheard 
two  clergymen  talking  of  the  efforts  made 
by  the  charity  organization  in  their  town 
to  cope  with  the  "social  evil."  They  had 
evidently  been  asked  to  cooperate,  and  one 
minister  was  explaining  his  refusal  to  the 
other  by  the  remark,  "But  of  course  that 
sort  of  thing  is  quite  outside  the  church's 
domain." 

The  man  who  is  going  to  advance  the 
Kingdom  of  God  in  the  world  in  any  way 
must  be  in  the  world  enough  to  understand 
it.  A  clergyman  whom  I  know  always 
dresses  in  a  light  business  suit  and  inva- 
riably lunches  at  a  down-town  club,  that 
he  may  mix  with  other  men,  as  the  Galilean 
Carpenter  did,  and  so  may  know  the  real 
minds  and  interests  of  those  he  is  trying  to 
help.  Only  by  understanding  a  patient's 
needs  can  any  physician  hope  for  success. 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  93 

It  is  no  use  merely  shouting,  "Down  with 
rich  corporations,"  however  bad  they  may 
be,  unless  we  are  prepared  to  find  substi- 
tutes for  them.  Christ's  religion  especially 
is  bound  to  be  constructive.  There  is  a 
danger  of  the  shallow  man  ^shouting  that 
his  voice  may  be  heard,  just  as  there  is 
that  the  scholar  may  be  led  into  thinking 
too  much.  The  proof  of  this  is  not  diflScult 
to  discover.  We  have  only  to  go  and  see 
why  it  is  that  some  preachers  face  empty 
pews  while  other  churches  are  packed  with 
men. 

The  people  in  these  days  gauge  things 
by  their  practical  value;  and  men  go  to  the 
church  only  if  it  has  something  to  give 
them.  They  will  go  to  "  divine  service'* 
only  if  they  find  it  inspires  them  to  express 
better  their  own  devotion  in  human  serv- 
ice. This  fact  has  further  been  exemplified 
among  our  own  fishermen  by  a  fishermen's 
union  which  started  twelve  months  ago, 
and  now  has  seventeen  thousand  members. 
In  another  twelve  months  it  promises  to 


94  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

include  the  whole  number  of  the  most 
virile  among  them,  because  it  has  already- 
helped  them  to  get  a  fairer  return  for  their 
labor,  and  to  make  their  own  voices  heard 
in  matters  which  concern  their  direct  home 
and  personal  interests. 

In  our  country  the  church  buildings  are 
more  ornate  and  comfortable  than  ever, — 
better  auditoriums,  better  heated,  aired, 
and  seated.  The  clergy  are  adding  lantern 
lectures,  social  gatherings,  and  all  the  latest 
attractions  copied  from  the  churches  here. 
But  in  spite  of  all  this  the  pews  are  actually 
not  one  whit  more  crowded  than  when  I 
went  there  twenty  years  ago. 

The  fact  is  that  as  yet  church  members 
have  not  realized  the  acuteness  of  the  social 
problem.  In  Labrador  this  is  excusable. 
There  we  are  still  living  in  a  period  of  a 
hundred  years  ago.  Our  laboring  classes 
have  not  yet  acquired  the  advantages  of 
education.  They  have  only  just  begun  to 
discover  that  if  the  workers  go  hungry  and 
naked,  while  the  thinkers  live  in  super- 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  95 

fluous  luxury,  there  must  be  something 
wrong.  Nor  do  they  yet  Hve  near  enough 
to  the  offensive  selfishness  of  the  idle  rich  to 
contrast  their  condition  with  the  poor  op- 
portunity and  wretched  lot  in  life  which  is 
the  best  they  can  expect  their  own  unceas- 
ing toil  to  afford.  A  large  proportion  of  the 
aged  and  physically  incapacitated  workers 
still  expect  at  the  end  of  life  to  have  to 
look  to  charity  for  the  merest  means  of  sub- 
sistence. The  labor  unions  have  already 
improved  conditions,  and  the  working 
classes  are  beginning  to  see  that  many 
things  are  not  right;  and  that  customs  pre- 
vail which  the  men  following  Christ  should 
never  have  countenanced. 

Similarly,  your  own  newspapers  almost 
daily  expose  some  abuse  of  the  control  of 
public  utilities  which  is  putting  absolutely 
unfair  remuneration  into  the  hands  of 
grafters.  These  offenses  are  beginning  to 
grate  badly  on  the  sensibilities  of  the  worth- 
while citizen. 
^   The  same  is  true,  again,  of  the  injuries 


96  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

inflicted  upon  communities  by  the  hold- 
ing-up  of  large  tracts  of  land,  and  the 
consequent  absorption  of  the  unearned 
increment,  by  those  who  do  absolutely  no- 
thing either  to  produce  or  to  deserve  it;  who 
only  cramp  and  crowd  unmercifully  those 
whose  labor  makes  the  value.  The  making 
of  outrageous  piles  of  money  from  the  pro- 
moting of  companies,  by  those  who  have  no 
intention  of  carrying  on  the  enterprises,  is 
all  wrong.  While  in  London,  it  was  largely 
advertised  that  I  was  to  lecture  under  the 
title,  "Midst  Ice  and  Snow  in  Labrador." 
It  so  happened  that  quite  a  number  of 
speculators  had  recently  taken  grants  for 
timber  areas  in  our  country.  Representa- 
tives from  more  than  one  such  company 
offered  me  remuneration  if  I  would  consent 
to  have  my  name  used  in  connection  with 
the  scheme.  The  value  of  their  proposi- 
tion to  the  public  was  more  than  doubtful. 
One  at  least,  which  was  the  most  insistent, 
was  to  my  mind  perfectly  unsound  as  an 
investment,  and  I  knew  that  no  proper 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  97 

precautions  had  been  taken  to  insure  the 
interests  of  the  investors.  It  was  simply 
a  scheme  of  rogues  for  swindling  the  public 
and  then  reaping  the  benefits.  The  repre- 
sentatives were  evidently  shaking  in  their 
shoes  as  to  what  I  was  going  to  say  of  the 
country  in  my  lecture,  for  they  told  me 
that  my  very  title  would  make  it  difl5cult 
for  them  to  sell  the  shares  which  they  had 
underwritten. 

Every  method  of  accumulating  wealth 
without  working  for  it,  or  of  reaping  greater 
returns  than  the  work  done  justifies,  is  be- 
ginning to  arouse  the  ire  of  the  great  masses 
of  the  people.  Whether  they  can  find  the 
remedy  is  open  to  question,  but  there  is 
no  doubt  they  are  starting  to  look  for  it. 
Thank  God,  so  are  some  of  the  churches. 
The  church  is  bound  by  its  philosophy  to 
believe  that  it  has  a  contribution  for  this 
as  well  as  every  other  social  trouble,  and 
that  there  is  a  remedy,  and  that  it  is  the 
church's  business  to  find  it. 

The  other  day  I  came  to  get  a  few  days* 


98  THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

rest  at  one  of  your  large  hotels,  directly 
from  Labrador,  where  a  man  has  to  work 
for  every  cent  he  earns.  Far  the  most 
marvelous  room  in  the  immense  luxm'ious 
pile  was  a  small  one  in  the  basement,  with 
a  blackboard  all  over  one  side  of  the  wall, 
on  which  were  endless  chalk  figm*es.  The 
manager,  who  was  showing  me  around, 
said,  "I  saw  one  of  the  guests  make  six 
thousand  dollars  in  that  room  last  summer 
in  the  course  of  one  morning.  He  gave  a 
thousand  of  it  to  another  man,  and  he  lost 
it  in  an  hour  or  two.  It  is  really  a  kind 
of  gambling-hell.  They  call  it  the  Stock 
Exchange!" 

A  couple  of  years  ago  I  was  in  the  Casino 
at  Monte  Carlo,  watching  the  roulette 
players.  It  amused  me  to  see  their  antics 
for  an  hour  or  so.  Yet  most  of  them  were 
playing  for  only  paltry  twenty-franc  bills. 

All  that  I  am  contending  is  that  such 
indecent  display  of  luxury,  and  all  these 
other  things  cannot  be  right.  I  am  not  sug- 
gesting a  remedy.   But  I  am  certain  that 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  99 

true  religion  offers  one,  and  offers  the  only 
one. 

With  us  in  Labrador  there  are  so  few 
clergy,  and  so  hard  is  it  to  get  the  chance 
to  be  married,  that  it  is  not  an  uncommon 
part  of  my  duties  as  a  siu'geon  and  a  mag- 
istrate to  have  to  tie  the  wedding  knot. 
But  with  us,  when  it  is  tied,  it  is  tied,  and 
it  is  never  unloosed.  Our  law  allows  no  di- 
vorce. We  have  to  come  to  the  United 
States  and  reside  six  months  to  obtain  that. 
Bishop  Potter,  Shailer  Mathews,  Peabody, 
and  others  among  our  foremost  modern 
thinkers  on  these  matters  are  unanimous 
that  the  relation  between  husband  and 
wife  is  second  only  to  that  between  God 
and  man  —  is  the  most  sacred  human  re- 
lation. We  all  know  what  Christ  said, — 
"that  a  man  should  forsake  all  others,  and 
cleave  to  his  wife." 

In  France  the  proportion  of  divorces  is 
enormous,  and  the  death  rate  more  than 
ever  in  excess  of  the  birth  rate.  But  right 
here  in  America,  even  taking  into  account 


100        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

the  increase  of  population,  the  proportion 
of  divorce  in  thirty  years  has  increased  over 
one  hundred  per  cent.  It  is  interesting  to 
note  that  in  times  of  commercial  depres- 
sion the  decrease  in  income  has  apparently 
knit  the  family  closer  together,  and  the 
number  of  divorces  has  dropped.  It  is  also 
interesting  to  note  that  the  proportion  of 
divorces  in  the  Western  States  is  many 
times  larger  than  in  the  Eastern. 

Here  again,  in  our  modern  life  something 
is  wrong.  It  seems  right  to  me  that  at  last, 
those  who  are  being  heard  most  forcibly  in 
this  matter,  are  members  of  the  churches. 
But  religion  has  not  yet  made  itself  felt  as  it 
might  have  done,  and  ought  to  have  done, 
on  so  vital  a  question.  Many  of  us  are  too 
busy  with  om*  own  little  dogmas  or  ritual 
or  polities,  and  our  own  special  doctrines, 
to  attend  to  any  of  these  things.  We  are 
so  afraid  that  the  saving  faith  which  has 
outlived  nineteen  centuries  without  us 
needs  us  now  to  keep  it  in  the  old  crystal- 
lized form  in  which  it  was  when  every 


CHRIST  AND  SOfilETY: '  ^  '  '•  \i&i 

single  aspect  of  the  life  it  came  to  save  was 
different.  We  consider  it  far  more  import- 
ant for  us  to  see  that  the  remedy  is  ad- 
ministered in  exactly  the  same  shape  as  it 
was  then,  than  that  the  active  principle 
should  be  clothed  and  adapted  to  the  idio- 
syncrasies, needs,  and  capacities  for  assim- 
ilation of  the  patients  of  to-day.  If  the 
church  stands  still,  and  everything  else 
goes  on,  it  seems  quite  probable  that  event- 
ually she  will  be  left  behind.  Calomel  is 
the  same  drug  as  ever,  and  is  still  adminis- 
tered, but  not  as  it  was  twenty-five  years 
ago.  Even  if  they  are  only  new  forms  of 
old  diseases,  the  treatment  of  the  same  old 
typhoid  and  the  same  old  heart  troubles  is 
quite  different  nowadays. 

Again,  I  am  certain  that  no  form  of 
government  can  ever  remedy  these  evils, 
so  long  as  men's  hearts  are  selfish.  There 
seems  little  to-day  to  encourage  reformers 
to  hand  over  money  and  business  respon- 
sibilities and  control  to  modern  legislatures, 
whether  civic,  state,  or  federal.    Judging 


102         lUE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

by  the  report  in  the  Book  of  Exodus,  mat- 
ters don't  seem  to  have  improved  much 
since  Moses'  day.  He  was  able  to  find  one 
man  out  of  every  ten  who  hated  covetous- 
ness,  but  he  had  promptly  to  appoint  such 
persons  to  look  after  the  other  nine. 

"America,  to  be  saved  from  barbarism," 
says  Dr.  Abbott,  "must  be  safeguarded  by 
force  from  without,  which  is  despotism,  or 
by  force  from  within,  which  is  religion." 
He  also  quotes  De  Tocqueville,  who  says: 
**  Religion  is  much  more  necessary  in  the 
republic  which  they  [atheistic  republicans] 
set  forth  in  glowing  colors  than  in  the 
monarchy  which  they  attack.  It  is  more 
needed  in  democratic  republics  than  in  any 
others.  How  is  it  possible  that  society 
should  escape  destruction  if  the  moral  tie 
be  not  strengthened  in  proportion  as  the 
political  tie  is  relaxed  .^^  And  what  can  be 
done  with  a  people  who  are  their  own  mas- 
ters, if  they  be  not  submissive  to  the 
Deity?"  1 

*  Dr.  Lyman  Abbott,  Yale  Lectures. 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  103 

But  it  is  no  religion  of  scribe  and  Phari- 
see that  is  needed.  It  is  said  of  a  certain 
rajah  that  he  kept  as  a  pet  a  Httle  white- 
haired  pig.  Nothing  would  cure  it  of  wal- 
lowing in  every  mud  pool  it  came  to,  till 
one  of  the  ruler's  wisest  counsellors  suc- 
ceeded in  removing  its  heart  and  substi- 
tuting that  of  a  young  lamb.  Education 
cannot  give  this  new  heart  any  more  than 
political  institutions  can. 

The  world  needs  religion  more  than  ever 
it  did,  but  a  religion  that  concerns  every 
feature  and  phase  of  life.  To  be  perfectly 
effective,  it  must  separately  inspire  every 
individual  with  the  spirit  of  unselfish  love. 
For  society  is  only  an  aggregate  of  individ- 
uals. That  was  distinctly  the  teaching  of 
the  Master,  and  his  method  of  achieving 
his  end. 

It  is  as  important  in  small  matters  as 
in  large.  Take  the  hundred  and  one  other 
get-rich-quick  methods,  commercial  shams 
and  swindles.  Reference  to  such  trifles  as 
the  use  of  patent  drugs  and  fraudulent 


IM         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

cure-alls  imposed  upon  a  gullible  public 
might,  it  seems,  be  almost  out  of  place  in 
a  discussion  of  this  kind.  But  I  have  seen 
how  the  sale  of  these  is  almost  in  inverse 
proportion  to  the  intelligence  of  the  vic- 
tims, which  means  so  often  in  proportion 
to  their  ability  to  lose  their  money.  If  one 
of  us  loses  a  hundred  dollars  in  a  bucket- 
shop  swindle,  he  can  afford  to  laugh  at  the 
cleverness  of  the  trick.  But  I  have  seen 
the  bread-winner  of  a  hungry  and  naked 
family  stinting  his  children  in  proper  food 
that  he  might  send  twenty  dollars  for  an 
electric  belt  which  was  n't  even  a  belt  — 
much  less  electric.  It  is  the  privilege  of 
those  who  know  (i.e.,  of  religion)  to  save 
those  of  their  brethren  who  can't  and  don't 
know  for  themselves,  from  all  unright- 
eous imposition. 

Perhaps  this  is  more  easily  recognized 
when  the  question  is  one  of  foods.  The  pure- 
food  acts  are,  apparently,  just  the  very 
kind  of  exceedingly  mundane  regulations 
which  most  men  would  disassociate  from 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  105 

religion.  I  believe  they  save  as  much  suflFer- 
ing  as  many  of  the  discoveries  of  medicine 
cure  after  the  trouble  has  been  caused. 
Those  who  enforce  these  acts  certainly  do 
Christian  work. 

The  so-called  social  question  is  another 
matter  of  immense  general  importance. 
The  veil  which  is  drawn  over  it  is  a  very 
thin  one,  and  the  existence  of  red-light 
districts  is  alone  a  blot  on  our  social  life. 
No  doubt  there  is  good  in  most  of  us,  but 
alas,  we  have  no  imagination.  If  only  the 
awful  pathos  of  the  intolerable  burden  of 
misery  and  shame  which  this  spells  were 
realized,  the  innate  chivalry  of  manhood 
would  rise  in  loathing  against  that  which 
now  it  even  dares  to  wink  at.  If  men  could 
see  as  I,  a  physician,  have  been  forced  to 
see,  some  of  the  last  piteous  scenes  in  the 
drama  of  these  lost  lives,  they  would  realize 
that  hell  existed  right  alongside  them,  and 
that  they  were  as  surely  creating  it  as  the 
sentry  who  sleeps  at  his  post  causes  de- 
struction and  death  in  his  own  household. 


106         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

Just  think  of  a  brute  who  would  condemn 
his  own  sister  and  daughter  to  such  a  fate. 
Then  consider  the  creature  who  would  spare 
his  own,  but  damn  the  defenseless  of  others. 
Then  imagine  this  creature  posing  as  a 
man;  nay,  even  daring  to  assume  the  title 
"Christian,"  attending  public  worship  and 
arguing  as  to  the  intellectual  method  of 
salvation.  Wrapped  in  her  country's  flag 
I  buried  on  a  rocky  headland  of  our  lonely 
coast  just  such  a  broken  life  —  a  tender 
girl  of  eighteen  years,  dead  only  because 
she  dare  not  see  her  own  home  again.  Has 
religion  nothing  to  offer  .^^  Is  there  no  rem- 
edy? If  I  thought  so  I  would  here  and  now 
in  these  lectures  brand  the  pretenses  of  the 
Christ  as  false.  It  is  because  he  has  shown 
us  the  remedy  and  put  it  right  into  our 
hands,  for  this  and  every  other  social 
trouble,  that  I  stand  here  to-day.  Neither  a 
Solon  nor  a  Solomon  can  invent  laws  which 
will  prevent  this  evil.  Only  Christ  has 
taught  us  the  cure  for  this  canker  of  civil- 
ization —  a  cure  which  we  all  can  use.  It  is 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  107 

only  by  passing  many  laws  against  others, 
but  one  law  against  ourselves,  and  then 
seeing  to  it  that  it  is  carried  out.  You  can- 
not make  children  good  by  punishing  them; 
truly  loving  them  is  the  only  way;  the  love 
shown  by  the  Master  himself  being  our  ex- 
ample. The  fact  is, the  less  you  say  "don't," 
the  nearer  you  get  to  Christ's  teaching. 
The  "thou  shalt  nots"  were  all  said  by 
Moses.  The  religion  of  my  youth  was, 
practically,  though  not  quite  in  the  sense 
in  which  Harvard  uses  the  word,  "Thou 
shalt  not  —  or  the  Gridiron ! "  That  is 
no  way  to  induce  righteousness.  It  merely 
fixes  in  the  mind  a  desire  for  the  forbidden 
things.  This  is  pathetically  shown  when  for 
any  reason  the  will  control  is  suspended  — 
for  instance,  by  the  language  a  most  un- 
likely person  may  use  when  under  an 
anaesthetic,  or  in  a  period  of  temporary  in- 
sanity. 

The  Master  teaches  that  a  negative,  a 
void,  is  our  greatest  danger,  and  that  our 
supreme  source  of  strength  is  first  to  love 


108         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

some  one  else.  He  says,  "Thou  shall  love." 
Experience  teaches  that  to  love  him  is  the 
real  remedy.  I  have  been  asked  why  some 
men,  to  use  your  expressive  slang,  "go 
to  the  devil"  young,  and  why  some  others, 
after  an  apparently  innocuous  life,  follow 
the  same  road  after  middle  life.  Experi- 
ence again  suggests  that  there  is,  as  it  were, 
an  opsonic  index  of  character  as  well  as  in 
physical  things  —  and  a  personal  and 
possibly  a  physical  nervous  equation  of 
resistance.  Both  speak  to  me  of  the  need 
of  some  other  positive  source  of  strength 
outside  ourselves,  to  supply  our  lack. 

The  drink  question  is  another  modern 
problem  of  exactly  the  same  kind.  I  don't 
know  where  to  begin  to  bring  this  subject 
from  the  abstract  to  the  concrete.  One  can 
begin  anywhere.  Its  tragedies  are  familiar 
to  all  of  us.  They  are  positively  common- 
place. We  were  fighting  in  the  city  in 
which  I  lived  for  the  closing  of  saloons  on 
Sunday.  Half  an  hour  before  the  meeting 
I  was  called  to  see  a  distracted  mother 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  109 

whose  only  boy,  a  splendid  young  fisher 
lad,  had  just  fallen  drunk  over  the  quay- 
side and  lost  his  life.  The  scene  of  the 
accident  was  within  easy  stone's  throw  of 
the  platform  of  the  town  hall,  from  which 
I  tried  to  address  an  excited  and  turbulent 
meeting  packed  by  hired  supporters  of  the 
liquor  traffic.  Even  while  the  crowd  in- 
side was  passing  a  hostile  resolution  not 
to  close  the  saloons,  the  piteous  crowd 
outside  was  dragging  the  river  for  the  body 
of  yet  another  victim  of  the  evil.  The 
specialist  in  physiological  chemistry  of 
your  largest  hospital  declared  not  long 
ago,  that  alcohol  is  without  doubt  the 
greatest  ciu-se  of  civilization.  I  heard  re- 
cently at  Lowell  how  the  liquor  traffic  is 
forcing  drunkenness  just  for  gain  on  the 
large  Greek  quarter,  by  planting  in  their 
midst  a  saloon  with  a  renegade  Greek  as 
manager. 

Among  my  own  patients  was  once  a 
university  graduate,  a  young  married  man, 
a  millionaire,  of  brilliant  mind,  an  only  son. 


110         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

raving  with  delirium  tremens.  Think  of 
the  misery  and  wretchedness  which  even 
his  palace  could  do  nothing  to  mitigate.  I 
could  duplicate  this  sort  of  instance  many 
times,  and  from  my  own  University  of  Ox- 
ford, showing  that  education,  family,  rank, 
and  intelligence  are  no  safeguards  against 
this  danger. 

This  question  has  agitated  the  public 
mind  very  seriously  for  many  years.  A 
consensus  of  opinion  of  our  judges  holds 
alcohol  responsible  for  nine  tenths  of  our 
crimes.  Statisticians  have  proved  that  it 
costs  more  in  money  than  any  other  earthly 
thing.  Philanthropists  have  shown  that 
in  mental  and  bodily  suffering  it  is  the  most 
expensive  modern  agent.  Physicians  are 
equally  decided  that  it  is  more  fruitful  in 
disease  than  any  other  single  poison,  or- 
ganic or  inorganic.  In  short,  the  world 
is  at  last  convinced  that  as  a  beverage,  it 
is  neither  necessary  nor  desirable.  But 
alas,  no  one  can  prove  that  mankind  can- 
not be  trained  to  like  it,  and  even  if  we 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  111 

could  prove  it,  that  is  not  the  contribution 
of  religion.  The  contribution  of  religion  is, 
we  do  like  it  but  we  will  not  touch  it,  be- 
cause of  the  stumbling-block  it  is  to  others. 
What  answer  the  Christ  would  give  to  this 
question,  I  leave  each  man  who  loves  his 
brother  to  settle  for  himself.  His  religion 
can  never  be  satisJBed  anyhow  with  "thou 
shalt  nots":  something  more  than  that  is 
needed  for  others  —  but  He  himself  set 
the  example  of  "I  will  not." 

Too  long  the  idea  of  the  divine  revela- 
tion has  been  that  it  is  like  a  kind  of  fairy- 
story  beginning  with  "Once  upon  a  time 
there  was";  a  passable  method  for  child- 
hood, like  milk  for  babes,  but  a  passing 
one  also,  and  of  no  use  for  rapidly  growing 
manhood.  To  be  divine  at  all,  revelation 
must  be  "living."  There  is  too  much  of 
the  flavor  of  death  about  "life  in  abey- 
ance," and  to  religion  the  only  alternative 
to  life  is  spiritual  death.  The  vital  contri- 
bution of  the  church  is,  moreover,  only 
by  the  life  of  its  individual  members.  Not 


112        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

by  setting  up  ideals  and  talking  about 
them,  but  by  being  the  ideal  yourself,  will 
you  exhibit  the  treatment  of  the  Master 
for  these  ills. 

The  fact  is  you  yourself  are  the  only 
offering  you  can  make  which  is  undeni- 
able, to  this  or  any  other  problem.  This 
is  the  true  service  which  love  demands  of 
you.  When  religion  stands  for  this,  Noble 
Lectures  will  be  unnecessary,  and  preach- 
ing will  once  again  have  reached  its  climax 
—  at  its  own  starting-point. 

I  admit  that  it  is  only  a  little  of  the 
burden  at  best  which  any  one  of  us  can 
lift,  but  together  we  can  lift  a  lot.  I  was 
once  most  generously  accorded  a  reception 
by  a  representative  of  every  church,  in- 
cluding some  laymen  like  myself.  Amongst 
us  were  the  Catholic  priest,  the  Protestant 
clergy,  and  the  Jewish  rabbi.  I  ventured 
to  suggest  that  if  in  the  centre  of  our  circle 
were  placed  a  visible  burden  like  that  of  the 
world  which  needed  lifting,  we  should  all 
rush   together,  and   however  little  each 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  113 

accomplished,  the  result  would  be  that  the 
whole  weight  would  be  raised. 

I  have  not  referred  to  every  question 
of  modern  life.  If  I  tried  to  do  so,  the  end 
of  these  lectures  would  probably  be  de- 
livered to  empty  seats.  I  should  have  liked 
to  touch  upon  the  problem  of  world  peace 
—  a  question  on  which  so  much  thought 
and  eflFort  are  now  being  expended.  Re- 
ligion has  everything  to  contribute  to 
this. 

How  to  contribute  is  always  a  far  more 
important  question  than  "Can  I  contrib- 
ute ?  "  and  here  the  function  of  the  minister 
or  specialist  in  service  should  naturally  come 
in.  "What  can  I  do  to  inherit  eternal  life? " 
was  treated  by  the  Master  as  a  perfectly 
sane  question.  He  never  said,  "  You've 
nothing  to  do."  Human  reason  refuses  any 
longer  to  accept  the  idea  that  the  faith 
which  is  without  works  can  save  anybody. 
The  virtuous  man  is  no  longer  regarded  as 
a  distinct  species  from  the  holy  man.  For 
my  part  the  social  settlements  as  well  as 


114        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

the  churches  have  all  my  aflfection,  though 
I  was  once  taught  to  look  upon  them  as  a 
positive  menace  to  religion. 

For  some  years  I  had  the  privilege  of 
watching  at  close  range  the  work  at  Toyn- 
bee  Hall  in  Whitechapel.  From  the  time 
of  its  inception  one  thing  at  least  I  can 
vouch  for,  many  lives  were  elevated  by  their 
efforts,  many  sufferers  relieved,  many  home- 
less ones  cheered,  the  power  of  many  evil 
men  was  taken  away,  the  hungry  were  fed, 
the  naked  clothed,  wrongs  were  righted, 
hope  inculcated,  comfort  carried,  —  and 
all  these  things  at  great  personal  cost. 
There  was  a  singular  absence  of  being 
puffed  up,  of  seeking  their  own,  of  being 
easily  provoked.  There  is  simply  no  room 
for  the  sounding  of  brass  and  the  tinkling 
of  cymbals  in  the  modern  settlement  as  I 
have  seen  it,  and  my  experience  seems  to 
be  similar  to  that  of  thoughtful  and  quite 
unprejudiced  people  with  whom  I  have 
discussed  the  matter.  I  have  often  thought 
I  should  value  the  title  of  "Christian" 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  115 

more  if  I  might  be  allowed  to  share  it 
with  those  friends  in  the  settlements.  He 
who  would  say  of  such,  "  Go  to,  I  am  holier 
than  thou,"  seems  to  me  to  be  suflSeiently 
presumptuous  to  risk  his  own  right  to 
the  title.  I  know  few  who  could  afford  to 
throw  the  first  stone  at  them.  The  mere 
fact  that  in  a  place  like  Hull  House  no 
assemblies  for  public  worship  are  found 
advisable  seems  to  me  as  sane  an  argument 
for  condemning  them  as  for  a  similar  reason 
condemning  the  claims  of  a  surgical  oper- 
ating theatre  or  a  convalescent  ward.  Is 
not  Hull  House  truly  an  operating  theatre.'^ 
"There  can  be  no  truth  of  science,"  says 
Paradise,  "which  is  not  also  a  truth  of  re- 
ligion. There  can  be  no  discovery  of  nature's 
laws  which  is  not  also  a  revelation  of  God. 
There  can  be  no  passion  of  service  to 
mankind  which  is  not  also  true  disciple- 
ship  of  Jesus  Christ."  ^ 

I  was  taught  to  consider  labor  move- 
ments as  anarchical  and  atheistic.    I  have 
*  The  Church  and  the  Individual. 


116        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

been  immensely  encom'aged  to  find  the 
reverence  for  the  Christ  which  so  many  of 
the  leaders  possess.  They  are  now  by  no 
means  alone,  thank  God,  in  realizing  that 
idealism  must  dominate  the  production  of 
wealth  as  well  as  its  distribution.  The  finan- 
cial pirate  no  longer  ranks  higher  in  the 
world's  estimate  than  the  poor  fellow  who 
steals  a  loaf,  even  if  he  does  subscribe  to 
dogmas  unknown  to  the  latter.  The  way- 
ward city  juvenile  is  being  treated  in  an 
intelligent  Christian  manner,  and  efforts 
are  being  made  to  save  his  soul,  rather  than 
merely  to  punish  his  body.  So  also  the 
study  of  scientific  sociology  and  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  new  profession  of  the  ex- 
pert sociologist  is  a  Christian  advance. 
They  are  all,  after  all,  only  the  study  of 
how-to  love  your  neighbor  wisely. 

There  is  no  snobbery  in  recognizing  that 
money  has  a  religious  value,  and,  like  time, 
should  be  put  to  a  religious  use.  To  my 
mind  the  advice  which  Jesus  gave  to  the 
rich  young  man,  to  sell  all  he  had  and  give 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  117 

it  to  the  poor,  has,  Hke  much  else  of  the 
Master's  teaching,  been  willfully  misunder- 
stood. The  young  man  was  n't  told  to  make 
a  fool  of  himself,  or  dump  his  wealth,  or 
injure  others  by  senseless  gifts,  or  that 
every  rich  man  should  shirk  his  responsi- 
bility and  put  it  upon  other  shoulders.  To 
even  give  away  money  is  a  worthy  life 
problem,  and  the  world  is  recognizing  it  to 
be  such;  nay,  it  is  not  only  demanding  that 
men  shall  use  their  wealth,  but  that  they 
use  it  wisely.  It  is  perfectly  true  "that 
the  condition  for  permanence  and  primacy 
is  service,  and  that  knowledge  is  the  con- 
dition of  service."  There  are  men,  and 
perhaps  the  rich  young  man  was  among 
them, — I  know  one  or  two, — whom  I  would 
certainly  class  in  the  category  of  those 
whom  it  would  be  wise  to  separate  from 
their  money  in  order  to  save  their  own 
lives.  More  and  more  are  endeavoring 
wisely  to  distribute  their  own  wealth 
themselves,  and  so  prevent  its  doing  harm 
and  causing  waste;  and  this  is  ever  more 


118         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

and  more  being  demanded  of  them  as  a 
religious  service. 

As  in  my  last  lecture  I  urged  upon  you 
the  consideration  that  any  manly  profes- 
sion may  be,  nay,  to  be  truly  manly  must 
be,  carried  on  as  a  Christian  service,  in 
this  I  wish  to  emphasize  a  yet  higher  and 
wider  conception  —  that  all  social  service 
in  its  broadest  sense  is  but  a  reasonable 
Christian  activity.  Not  only  in  his  private 
life,  but  also  in  his  public  life,  a  man  may 
bring  Christ's  dynamic  power  into  the 
community;  and  only  in  that  way  can 
rich  and  poor,  the  struggling  and  those  at 
ease,  ever  hope  to  behold  "how  good  and 
pleasant  a  thing  it  is  to  dwell  together  in 
unity."  In  that  state  "there  can  be  no 
truth  of  science  which  is  not  also  a  truth 
of  religion.  There  can  be  no  discovery  of 
nature's  laws  which  is  not  also  a  revelation 
of  God.  There  can  be  no  passion  of  serv- 
ice to  mankind  which  is  not  also  true 
discipleship  of  Jesus  Christ." 

The  knowledge  of  God  is  life;  complete 


CHRIST  AND  SOCIETY  119 

correspondence  with  him  is  eternal  life. 
To  ask  what  is  the  contribution  of  religion 
to  life  is  to  ask  what  life  is.  Religion  can 
contribute  to  existence,  but  real  religion 
makes  Lifb. 


LECTURE  IV 

CHRIST  AND   THE   DAILY  LIFE 

In  this,  my  last  lecture,  I  am  anxious  to 
show  that  which  I  most  truly  believe, 
namely,  that  all  through  the  ages,  all  that 
which  has  been  worth  while,  all  that  which 
has  tended  to  uplift  the  world,  all  that  which 
has  made  for  the  noblest  ends,  has  been  ac- 
complished by  the  possession  of  the  spirit 
of  the  Master,  if  not  the  profession  of  his 
service  or  the  knowledge  of  his  name.  I 
read  a  story  once  by  Laura  E.  Richards, 
called  "The  Grumpy  Saint."  While  walking 
along  the  highway  one  day  he  met  a  poor 
woman  staggering  under  a  burden  which 
she  was  not  fit  to  carry.  When  she  asked  his 
help,  he  scolded  her  for  attempting  such  a 
task,  upbraided  her  husband  for  permitting 
it,  and  the  world  for  making  it  necessary. 
But  he  took  the  load  and  carried  it  to  her 
door.    A  little  farther  along  he  met  a  child 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAH^Y  LIFE    121 

who  had  lost  her  way  and  was  crying  with 
fear  and  cold  and  hunger.  When  she  asked 
him  the  way  he  demanded  what  the  child 
thought  he  was  for!  How  could  he  waste 
time?  Besides,  he  did  n't  know  where 
her  home  was,  and  in  any  case  it  was  her 
own  fault  for  being  disobedient  and  run- 
ning away.  But  he  took  oflF  his  coat  and 
wrapped  it  about  the  child,  and  gave  her 
the  food  he  had  prepared  for  himself  on  the 
journey.  Then  he  lifted  her  up  and  car- 
ried her,  until  eventually  he  left  her  in  her 
mother's  arms.  Was  or  was  not  this  man 
a  disciple  of  Jesus  Christ.? 

It  is  with  this  thought  in  my  mind  that 
I  have  decided,  though  without  any  more 
claim  to  be  a  historian  than  a  theologian, 
to  try  to  show,  though  it  can  be  little  more 
than  a  mere  suggestion  in  one  brief  lec- 
ture, that  the  records  of  achievement  left 
throughout  history  by  men  who  are  Christ- 
ians by  Christ's  own  standard  are  such  as 
any  common-sense  person  at  his  best  would 
envy.  If  we  understand  them  rightly,  they 


122         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

show  us  that  just  in  proportion  as  the  men 
had  the  spirit  of  Jesus,  they  were  worth 
while;  and  they  teach  that  if  we  wish  to 
make  good  in  life,  we  too  must  aspire  to 
gain  it.  He  who,  gauged  by  the  Master's 
valuation,  deserves  of  posterity  the  title 
"Christian,"  has  never  left  behind  him  a 
record  of  ineflSciency.  On  the  other  hand, 
I  want  to  leave  it  in  your  minds  as  my  testi- 
mony that  those  who  are  consciously  striv- 
ing to  follow  a  Christ  whom  they  know,  and 
whom  they  acknowledge,  possess  a  com- 
pelling power  over  and  above  the  force  of 
those  men  who  have  only  a  passion  for 
abstract  righteousness,  or  an  innate  fine- 
ness of  moral  calibre.  Beyond  question  the 
Master  himself  taught  this.  That  is  the 
power  which  has  given  the  world  pictures 
like  that  of  James  Gilmore  of  Mongolia, 
absolutely  alone  crossing  the  great  wall  of 
China,  and  alone  wandering  on  foot  along 
the  byways  of  Manchuria,  that  he  might 
reach  the  hitherto  untouched  Mongols  of 
the  desert  of  Gobi.  It  was  that  spirit  which 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAILY  LIFE    123 

kept  Livingstone  in  Africa,  sent  Gordon 
to  Khartoum  and  Father  Damien  to 
Molokai.  These  men's  lives  are  valu- 
able heritages  for  all  time,  to  hold  up  as 
examples  of  unselfish  courage,  exactly  as 
Christ's  own  is.  They  are  an  heirloom  of 
which  any  nation  may  be  proud,  whether 
or  not  the  men  had  a  correct  apprehen- 
sion of  absolute  truth. 

The  Christian  of  Christ's  lifetime  was 
a  very  human  person,  in  direct  natural 
communication  with  the  Master.  He  was 
not  peculiar  in  his  dress,  his  method  of 
worship,  or  his  theories  of  life.  He  was  not 
remarkable  for  his  mysticism,  his  idealism, 
or  any  other  "isms."  He  loved  and  married 
like  other  folk,  and  enjoyed  the  good  things 
of  life  as  well  as  they.  He  was  just  a  man. 
He  could  lie  like  Peter,  seek  graft  like  James 
and  John,  be  conceited  like  Thomas,  or 
fail  in  loyalty  like  Judas.  He  was  not 
gifted  with  any  peculiar  perspicacity. 

None  of  the  disciples  apparently,  in  spite 
of   their  singular  advantages,  knew  who 


124         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

Christ  was,  or  why  he  was  unlike  other 
men  in  not  seeking  to  save  himself.  The 
Christian  of  that  day  was  not,  so  far  as  we 
can  tell,  an  intellectual  genius  or  a  spiritual 
giant.  What  Christ  made  these  men  we 
all  know;  and  what  he  made  of  them  he 
can  make  of  us.  Fisherman  John  became 
wise  enough  to  describe  the  Master  as  "the 
Word  of  God,"  and  leave  the  world  mono- 
graphs which  will  outlive  the  writings  of  all 
the  sages.  Custom-house  officer  Matthew 
left  us  a  document  which  even  a  Hawthorne 
with  a  similar  training  in  the  nineteenth 
century  could  not  parallel.  There  is  no 
reasonable  doubt  that  the  courage  of 
Simon  Peter  and  his  runaway  friends,  in 
later  life,  has  never  been  excelled.  In  their 
tireless  bodily  work,  in  their  marvellous 
mental  productions,  in  their  lofty  unselfish 
conduct,  in  mind,  body,  and  spirit,  this 
company  of  men,  through  contact  with 
Jesus  Christ,  came  to  embody  all  that 
would  make  any  good  man  wish  to  be 
ranked  of  their  number.    The  lofty  posi- 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAILY  LIFE    125 

tion  which  they  have  occupied  in  men's 
estimation,  and  which  they  still  occupy, 
was  fully  justified,  and  will,  I  believe,  be 
more  and  more  deeply  realized,  whatever 
happens  in  the  future  to  dogmatic  theology. 
Their  attractiveness  was  undoubted,  for 
everywhere  men  joined  them;  not  for  what 
they  could  get,  for  that  was  seldom  attract- 
ive, but  for  what  they  could  in  their  turn 
give.  It  certainly  was  not  so  much  the 
desire  for  gain  here  or  hereafter,  as  the  be- 
lief that  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  earth 
could  use  what  they  had  to  contribute,  that 
fired  men's  hearts  to  loyalty  for  the  or- 
ganization they  founded.  The  mistaken 
idea  of  the  immediate  coming  of  the  end 
of  the  world  and  the  short  road  to  eternal 
bliss  was  no  doubt  a  comfort  and  an  at- 
traction to  them.  But  it  was  not  their 
Master's  teaching  as  we  read  it.  It  is  evi- 
dence of  the  continued  human  liability  to 
error  even  among  those  who  were  the  very 
closest  to  Christ's  person.  When  men  were 
near  to  Christ,  they  needed  nothing  but 


126        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFEf 

the  atmosphere  of  his  spirit  to  attract  them 
to  him,  but  as  they  got  farther  and  farther 
away  from  him  in  spirit  and  in  time,  they 
used  this  doctrine  as  a  bait  to  compensate 
for  the  loss  involved  in  this  world  by  be- 
coming his  followers.  But  I  will  not  believe 
it  was  ever  the  chief  factor  in  the  appeal  to 
follow  Christ,  any  more  than  the  promise 
attached  to  the  Fifth  Commandment  makes 
me  honor  my  father  and  mother. 

As  for  the  name  "Christian,"  it  was 
originally  given  in  contempt,  and  was  used 
by  men  of  the  world  as  a  stigma  and  a  re- 
proach. From  that  reproach  Christians 
themselves  soon  redeemed  it  by  displaying 
the  spirit  of  Christ.  It  came  to  stand  for 
that  humility,  mercy,  and  justice  which 
the  Scripture  tells  us  God  calls  for  still. 
It  spelled  loyalty,  courage,  and  self-sac- 
rifice; and  the  world,  ever  able  to  recognize 
if  not  always  willing  to  accept  the  noblest, 
in  a  few  centuries  changed  its  attitude. 
The  Christian  knight  became  the  ideal  of 
history. 


CHRIST  AND   THE   DAILY   LIFE    127 

It  was  not  long,  however,  before  the 
organization  of  the  scattered  groups  into 
bodies  for  mutual  strength  and  protection 
began  seriously  to  disturb  the  minds,  not 
only  of  those  who  represented  the  vast 
interests  of  religion,  but  of  the  temporal 
powers  as  well.  Rich  as  well  as  poor  began 
to  feel  the  force  of  the  call  of  Jesus,  and 
he  found  followers  even  in  Caesar's  house- 
hold. The  simplicity  and  attractiveness 
of  the  Christian  was  a  protest  against  evil. 
How  is  it  we  seldom  see  any  persecutions 
of  modern  Christians?  ItUs  certainly  not 
because  there  is  no  graft  in  high  places. 

When  for  the  first  time  I  wandered 
through  the  old  Coliseum  at  Rome,  it  was 
at  night,  by  moonlight,  and  the  spirits  of 
the  men  who  had  suflFered  upon  the  very 
ground  I  trod  seemed  almost  visible.  I,  a 
so-called  Christian,  felt  humiliated,  not 
repelled. 

Yet  persecution  never  really  injured  the 
growth  of  faith  in  Christ.  Those  who  tried 
to  follow  in  his  footsteps  grew  more  and 


128         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

more  numerous.  Rottenness  began  from 
within.  In  the  organization  itself  there 
grew  up  rank  and  privilege;  talkers  began 
to  count  as  higher  than  workers  and  claim 
for  themselves  special  proximity  to  the 
Master.  As  if  Jesus  himself  had  not  talked 
far  more  in  works  than  in  words,  had  not 
laid  far  more  emphasis  on  works,  had  not 
devoted  far  more  time  to  works,  and  had 
not  referred  those  in  doubt  to  his  works  as 
his  indorsement.  This  restraint  on  Christ's 
part  from  laying  down  dogmas  is  more  re- 
markable, the  longer  one  thinks  about  it. 
That  sects  should  still  be  unable  to  settle 
whether  Satm-day  or  Sunday  is  the  true 
day  of  rest,  that  men  should  be  able  even 
to  attempt  to  defend  slavery,  or  to  try  to 
enforce  celibacy  on  the  authority  of  his 
teaching,  is  evidence  of  the  scope  he  left 
for  individuality  by  never  laying  down 
minute  rules,  but  only  enunciating  general 
principles. 

Yet  it  is  always  easier  to  talk  than  to  do, 
and  presumably  the  cleverer  men  soon  dis- 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAH^Y  LIFE    129 

covered  this.  Alas,  talking,  more  especially 
on  matters  or  facts  about  which  we  cannot 
appeal  to  our  physical  senses,  is  just  as 
likely  to  divide  as  doing  is  certain  to  unite. 
As  late  as  the  Reformation,  no  theological 
question  was  too  slight  to  engender  hatred, 
and  even  to  provoke  civil  war.  Indeed, 
so  began  the  differences  which  invented 
"heresy,"  and  then  councils  and  creeds  to 
define  and  locate  and  eradicate  it. 

With  the  advent  of  classes  in  the  church, 
one  ruling  and  the  other  serving,  social 
differences  became  easy  to  justify,  and  in 
fact  almost  inevitable.  Moreover,  it  seemed 
suddenly  to  dawn  on  the  real  outsiders,  the 
men  without  the  Master's  spirit,  that  Chris- 
tianity was  a  mighty  force,  and  formed 
a  bond  between  men  which  was  far  more 
durable  than  any  involuntary  one.  It 
only  needed  careful  using  and  it  would 
serve  to  bolster  up  temporal  as  well  as 
spiritual  power.  So  gradually  was  evolved 
the  complex  and  immense  structure  of  the 
Papacy.   Eventually  there  followed  in  the 


130         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

name  of  Christ  so  fantastic  an  interpreta- 
tion of  his  service  as  the  Crusades.  What- 
ever the  church  taught  verbally,  it  practi- 
cally set  up  at  that  period  the  possession 
of  property  as  an  object  for  worship,  and 
so  at  once  destroyed  the  Christ  vision  of 
the  paramount  value  of  life. 

Like  the  graphic  representation  of  the 
human  heart  beat  on  the  sphygmographic 
drum,  the  track  of  real  Christ-following 
through  history  seems  to  have  risen  and 
fallen  in  a  kind  of  rhythm,  though  at  times, 
like  a  hectic  temperature  chart,  to  have 
been  little  above  the  neutral  line.  Whether 
there  will  ever  be  millennial  peace  on  earth, 
or  whether  the  waxing  and  waning  war- 
fare is  essential  for  the  evolution  of  our 
souls'  welfare,  may  be  open  to  question, 
but  that  the  true  Christ-following  has  al- 
ways brought  out  the  heroic  in  men  is  not 
open  to  doubt.  It  seems  somehow  that 
conflict  is  necessary  for  the  perfection  of 
character.  I  know  that  in  navigating  our 
coast  to-day  I  feel  twice  as  reliable  a  pilot 


CHRIST  AND  THE   DAH^Y  LIFE     131 

for  the  bad  times  I  have  had  on  so  many 
rocks. 

Anyhow,  the  organization  designed  to 
foster  and  safeguard  Christ's  Kingdom 
gradually  deprived  men  of  all  personal 
freedom.  The  leaders  not  only  "suffered 
themselves  to  be  called  Master,"  but  posi- 
tively liked  it,  and  eventually  insisted  they 
were  so,  till  the  persecutions  which  they 
themselves  instituted  against  men  who 
evinced  Christ's  spirit  were  ten  times  more 
cruel  than  those  instigated  by  the  early 
pagans.  The  Duke  of  Alva  was  a  type  of 
such  men.  But  in  spite  of  this,  the  organ- 
ization harbored  all  the  while  the  living 
germ,  without  which  it  must  have  died, 
and  with  which,  with  all  its  shortcomings, 
it  slowly  helped  to  advance  the  true  King- 
dom of  God.  The  germ,  however,  some- 
times sank  to  the  bottom,  like  the  currants 
in  a  badly  mixed  cake,  and  few  managed  to 
obtain  it. 

The  biographies  and  autobiographies  of 
men  of  action  have  always  been  the  most 


132         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

attractive  literature  to  me.  Whether  or 
not  they  have  had  the  orthodox  label,  the 
appeal  of  such  lives  is  just  as  great  and 
must  tend  to  kindle  any  spark  of  manliness 
in  us  —  that  our  brief  day  of  life  may  also 
be  used  to  some  noble  pm-pose.  To  me  it 
has  been  a  thousand  times  helpful  to  look 
back  upon  the  story  of  the  centuries,  and 
realize  how  differently  men  interpret  the 
call  of  God  to  them,  and  how  varied  are 
the  services  which  can  be  approved  as 
"Christian."  It  is  only  the  brave  efforts 
through  the  ages  of  men  of  that  type,  men 
often  of  very  ordinary  attainments,  which 
have  even  partially  given  us  back  our  free- 
dom to-day.  But  we  are  still  far  from  spirit- 
ually free.  Numbers  of  men  and  women 
are  still  tangled  up  in  the  meshes  and  intri- 
cacies of  theologies  and  theories  and  con- 
ventions. Many  are  still  satisfied  to  sub- 
mit to  external  authority  instead  of  their 
individual  vision.  But  if  religion  is  to 
grapple  with  the  social  questions  of  to-day, 
to  attract  when  it  can  no  longer  compel, 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAH^Y  LIFE    133 

and  to  satisfy  the  practical  minds  of  mod- 
ern youth,  it  must  come  down  from  heaven 
to  earth,  and  this  even  though  the  process 
will  involve  much  heart-burning  on  the  part 
of  the  theologian,  and  still  some  martyr- 
dom on  the  side  of  those  who  break  with 
the  old  order. 

How  are  men  to  decide  who  is  a  Christian 
or  how  far  the  inability  to  say,  "Rabbi, 
thou  art  the  Christ,  the  Son  of  God," 
made  eleven  out  of  twelve  disciples  for- 
feit their  right  to  the  title?  For  example, 
no  body  of  men  will  agree  as  to  the  claims 
of  world-influencing  writers  like  Goethe, 
Shakespeare,  or  Locke;  of  scientists  who 
have  advanced  knowledge,  like  Coperni- 
cus, Newton,  or  Darwin;  of  artists  who  have 
altered  the  conception  of  art,  like  Raphael, 
Michael  Angelo,  or  Da  Vinci;  of  statesmen 
who  have  changed  the  course  of  history, 
like  William  of  Orange  or  Oliver  Cromwell; 
of  earnest  truth-seeking  philosophers  so 
different  as  Plato,  Kant,  and  Spencer;  in- 
deed, any  of  the  whole  gamut  of  human 


134         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

beings  whose  lives  have  been  used  for  the 
amelioration  of  the  conditions  of  life  on 
earth,  and  have  contributed  their  quota 
toward  making  the  Kingdom  of  God  more 
possible  here  and  now.  We  are  too  apt  to 
grudge  other  people  their  haloes,  and  too 
fond  of  trying  to  preen  our  own  —  a  diffi- 
cult matter  under  any  circumstances !  Our 
judgment  ought  surely  to  depend  upon 
what  we  consider  was  the  Kingdom  Christ 
came  on  earth  to  found.  The  Kingdom 
of  God  for  which  I  am  working  is  an  ideal 
world,  a  world  in  which  the  soul's  environ- 
ment, which  of  course  includes  the  body 
in  which  it  dwells,  must  be  made  more  ideal. 
Even  pagans  so  long  ago  as  the  philosopher 
Lucian  stated  the  opinion  that  the  soul  is 
as  much  helped  by  the  flesh  as  the  flesh  by 
the  soul.  Yet  it  has  become  necessary  for 
both  of  these  truths  to  be  demonstrated 
alongside  us  in  Boston,  as  if  they  were  new 
discoveries  of  the  twentieth  century.  They 
seem  to  have  been  forgotten  or  neglected 
by  the  churches. 


CHRIST  AND  THE -DAILY  LIFE    135 

That  is  exactly  what  gives  us  the  fun 
of  service  —  because  it  includes  everything 
we  can  do  to  help  out.  The  "joy  of  serv- 
ice" is  so  much  exalted  in  these  days  that 
one  might  almost  suppose  there  existed 
normally  a  craving  for  the  joy  of  useless- 
ness.  That  is  the  supreme  joy  of  the  bar- 
nacle, who,  though  born  a  free-swimming 
animal,  prefers  even  in  his  youth  a  life  of 
inaction,  and  after  fastening  his  head  to 
a  rock  spends  the  remainder  of  his  days 
kicking  food  into  his  mouth  with  his  hind 
legs. 

Again,  surely  we  can  look  upon  as  dis- 
ciples of  the  Christ  all  those  who  from 
purely  patriotic  motives  have  devoted  their 
stay  on  earth  to  the  welfare  of  their  coun- 
try, and  at  personal  risk  and  sacrifice  have 
sought  to  raise  her  to  their  highest  ideals. 
Fighting  may  not  be  the  ideal  Christian 
way  to  gain  an  end,  but  we  must  remember 
that  Christ  does  not  judge  men  by  what 
they  do  not  see,  but  by  what  they  do  see. 
Who  would  not  gladly  face  the  supreme 


1S6         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

tribunal,  so  far  as  their  patriotism  is 
concerned,  with  the  record  of  Gustavus 
Adolphus,  Joan  of  Arc,  Count  Cavour, 
Louis  Kossuth,  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  or 
George  Washington,  and  among  living  men 
the  heroes  of  the  Japanese  War  ?  Or,  seeing 
the  cruel  straits  and  horrible  conditions 
inflicted  on  Germany  by  Napoleon,  who 
would  not  follow  a  Stein,  a  Bismarck,  or  a 
Moltke?  Certainly  many  of  these  men 
think  themselves  Christians  just  as  much  as 
we  regard  ourselves  in  that  light.  I  was 
reared  on  stories  like  that  of  General 
Havelock  and  his  saints,  of  Clive  and 
Lawrence,  of  Wolfe  and  Drake.  It  will 
probably  be  long,  however,  before  the 
French  believe  Bismarck  was  not  lying 
when  he  said:  "If  I  did  not  believe  Provi- 
dence had  destined  this  nation  for  some- 
thing great  and  good,  I  should  at  once 
give  up  my  position  as  a  diplomat  or 
never  have  entered  on  it  at  all."  Yet 
human  judgment  on  a  Gordon  who  stayed 
the  cruelties  of  the  Taiping  Rebellion,  or 


CHRIST    AND  THE   DAILY  LIFE    137 

a  Cromwell  who  opposed  the  divine  right 
of  kings,  or  even  a  Lincoln  who  fought  to 
free  his  fellows  from  slavery  will  no  doubt 
be  different  according  to  the  tribunal  be- 
fore which  they  are  tried.  The  right  inter- 
pretation of  true  loyalty  must  be  left 
to  each  man's  conscience.  Moses,  David, 
and  Paul  expressed  their  willingness  to  be 
castaways  themselves  if  their  people  might 
be  saved.  For  my  part,  I  can  quite  con- 
ceive the  profession  of  arms,  at  any  rate 
in  the  past,  as  being  a  religious  service,  and 
as  often  seeming  to  such  men  the  only 
means  available  for  advancing  the  King- 
dom of  God.  Centurions  were  among 
Christ's  first  followers.  Personally,  I  thank 
God  for  the  view  of  a  wide  and  ever- 
changing  range  of  service. 

The  unendurable  miseries  of  the  masses 
at  the  time  of  the  French  Revolution 
called  for  a  Christian  champion  and  found 
none.  Surely  this  was  only  for  lack  of  the 
vision  of  their  opportunities.  Even  if  the 
churches  of  any  day  are  no  more  Christian 


138         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

than  the  temporal  powers,  nevertheless, 
God's  purposes  will  be  wrought  out  with- 
out us  if  we  will  not  help.  There  can  be  no 
doubt  that  the  ultimate  result  of  the  Re- 
volution was  a  distinct  gain  to  the  kingdom 
of  righteousness,  joy,  and  peace,  —  that 
the  present  happy  and  prosperous  French 
peasantry  was  made  possible  by  it,  and 
'that  the  lessons  it  impressed  on  the  rulers 
of  the  world  materially  hastened  the  broader 
brotherhood  of  man.  But  had  true  men 
with  the  Master's  spirit  been  forthcoming 
to  guide  the  process,  who  can  doubt  but 
that  the  same  ends  could  have  been  ac- 
complished without  the  horrors  and  in- 
famies that  the  Revolution  involved?  It 
was  Guizot,  not  an  ecclesiastic,  who,  when 
he  fled  to  England  as  the  only  stable  throne 
in  Europe,  said  to  Lord  Shaftesbury,  "Sir, 
it  is  their  religion  which  has  saved  the 
English  nation." 

It  sometimes  takes  catastrophes  to  show 
the  church  as  well  as  the  world  the  incal- 
culable opportunities  to  make  life  worth 


CHEIST  AND  THE   DAILY  LIFE    139 

while,  which  they  are  constantly  throwing 
away.  That  it  is  as  much  the  vision  as  the 
will  which  men  need  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  only  five  years  before  the  Revolution 
a  French  historical  philosopher  wrote: 
"  The  political  system  of  Europe  has  ar- 
rived at  perfection.  Few  reforms  are 
needed.  There  is  no  need  nowadays  to 
fear  a  revolution."  ^ 

As  an  absolute  antithesis  to  the  services 
of  the  physical  fighter  to  the  Kingdom  of 
God,  take  that  of  the  philosopher,  Hugo 
Grotius.  Stirred  by  the  wholesale  con- 
demnation of  people  to  death  for  heresy, 
and  the  frightful  cruelties  perpetrated  on 
the  innocent  and  noncombatants  in  war, 
he  satisfied  his  passion  for  service  by  the 
writing  of  long  books  in  Latin.  By  his 
immortal  work,  "De  Jure  BeUi  et  Pacis,'' 
he  awakened  the  world  to  the  Christian 
sense  of  God's  international  family,  and 
he  laid  the  foundation  for  all  future  inter- 
national law.    There  seems  no  fear  of  the 

*  Seven  Great  Statesmen. 


140         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

overcrowding  of  this  particular  branch  of 
service  to-day;  the  writing  of  books  in 
Latin  is  a  little  out  of  vogue.  But  who  shall 
doubt  that  it  was  a  truly  Christian  service, 
and  that  the  law  schools  to-day  have  God- 
like opportunities  yet  open  to  them  before 
the  reign  of  peace  universal. 

It  is  not  part  of  my  scheme  to  publish  a 
schedule  of  Christian  services.  In  ten  thou- 
sand experiences  of  everyday  life  we  cannot 
fail  to  see  that  God  not  only  permits  but 
seeks  our  cooperation  in  the  establishment 
of  his  Kingdom.  If  we  find  this  out  too 
late  and  have  to  look  back  on  a  life  full  of 
opportunities  which  we  have  let  slip,  we  can 
have  no  longer  any  excuse  to  mitigate  our 
remorse. 

Now  that  we  cannot  be  forced  to  do  so, 
we  no  longer  admit  that  God  will  only  make 
his  will  plain  through  a  third  party.  God 
certainly  does  make  plain  the  way  of  life 
to  those  who  seek  it  in  sincerity  and  truth. 
We  are  no  longer  accountable  to  human 
authority.    Bismarck   once   rebuked    the 


CHRIST  AND  THE   DAILY  LIFE    141 

autocratic  Wilhelm  the  First  for  sneering 
at  the  word  "pietist,"  by  saying,  "Christ- 
ianity is  not  the  creed  of  Court  chaplains." 
And  the  finicking  arguments  of  the  religion- 
ists made  the  great  Doctor  Jowett  of  Bal- 
liol,  Oxford,  once  say,  "All  wise  men  have 
the  same  religion,  but  no  wise  man  will  say 
what  it  is." 

It  will  surely  comfort  some  who,  from 
their  evangelical  point  of  view,  might  be 
troubled  with  fears  that  this  broad  inter- 
pretation was  dangerously  modern  and  in- 
compatible with  the  simple  teaching  of  the 
Gospel,  to  know  that  so  unquestionable  a 
Christian  as  George  Fox  taught  that  "every 
hunger  of  the  heart,  every  dissatisfaction 
with  self,  every  sense  of  shortcoming,  shows 
that  the  soul  is  not  unvisited  by  the  Di- 
vine Spirit.  To  want  God  at  all  implies 
some  acquaintance  with  Him."  In  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men  Fox  always 
appealed  to  "that  of  God,"  or  "the  Christ 
within  them."  We  know  them  by  their 
fruits,  not  by  their  catechisms. 


142         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

The  only  real  heathen  and  heretics  are 
the  purely  selfish.  It  is  for  our  own  sakes 
as  well  as  theirs  that  we  desire  their  con- 
version. For  while  they  are  losing  all  life 
has  to  give,  we  are  losing  the  share  they 
might  contribute.  Alas,  there  are  still  many 
rich  in  talents  who  find  it  costs  too  much 
simply  to  follow  the  Master. 

For  my  part,  I  am  so  sure  that  God  is 
Love  that  I  never  worry  a  moment  about 
whether  divine  wisdom  and  power  could  n't 
have  devised  an  easier  road  for  redemption 
than  willing  personal  service.  That  to  me 
is  simply  loyalty,  and  of  that  quality  the 
professing  Christian  has  no  monopoly. 

I  never  believed  that  following  the  Mas- 
ter meant  having  no  will  of  our  own.  Christ 
had  a  will  of  his  own.  We  are  "to  stand 
on  our  feet,  and  hear  what  the  Lord  will  say 
to  us."  God  wants  men  with  a  will.  Only 
that  will  must  be  linked  with  God's.  Self- 
will  and  selfishness  are  always  obviously  an 
absolute  bar  to  unity  between  God  and 
man  and  between  man  and  man.    I  have 


CHRIST  AND   THE   DAILY  LIFE     143 

always  had  a  holy  horror  of  the  teaching 
that  the  Christian  religion  calls  for  a  back- 
boneless  type  of  person,  the  simpering,  long- 
haired, effeminate  creatm'e  so  familiar  in 
"sacred  art." 

'  Art  is  no  art  at  all  if  it  is  n't  sacred,  if  it 
does  n't  comfort  and  uplift.  It  does  n't  in- 
spire me  to  see  my  ideal  of  human  life,  the 
Christian  knight,  the  man  of  every  age  and 
every  station  and  every  calling  who  is  doing 
God's  work,  held  up  to  ridicule  as  a  sickly, 
effeminate  imbecile.  I  always  pictured  the 
Christ  at  college  as  captain  of  the  foot- 
ball team,  or  stroke  of  the  'Varsity  boat, 
or  one  of  the  honor  men,  because  these 
were  what  I  wanted  to  be  myself. 

It  is  this  hideous  teaching,  that  secular 
and  sacred  can  be  separated,  and  must  be 
labelled  so,  which  formerly  made  men  esti- 
mate the  claimants  to  religion  at  their  own 
valuation:  namely,  that  they  were  fitted 
for  talking,  but  not  for  competing  in  any- 
thing else  which  pertains  to  human  life, 
and  were  chiefly  remarkable  for  the  things 


144         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

they  did  not  do.  "  Consecration,  not  renun- 
ciation, makes  the  highest  character."  ^ 

So  long  as  we  make  the  division,  so  long 
as  Christ-following  does  not  mean  every 
single  method  and  way  that  can  make  this 
world  better  and  brighter,  Christ-following 
is  robbed  of  its  dignity,  its  joy,  its  utihty, 
—  and  its  future. 

Let  us  descend  to  the  concrete  for  a  mo- 
ment. In  Labrador  it  was  religious  to  con- 
duct public  worship,  to  lead  a  prayer- 
meeting,  to  marry,  to  baptize,  to  bury,  to 
take  up  collections,  to  foster  guilds.  It  was 
secular  to  do  medical,  legal,  commercial,  or 
any  kind  of  work  by  which  men  can  earn  a 
living.  It  was  religious  to  visit  and  condole 
with  the  hungry.  It  was  very  distinctly 
secular  to  run  a  cooperative  store  and 
feed  them.  It  was  religious  to  pray  on 
Wednesday  night  that  God  would  give  the 
people  a  good  fishery.  It  was  secular  on 
Thursday  to  make  twine  cheap,  to  build  a 
bait  freezer,  and  to  introduce  motor  dories. 

^  Doctor  Allen. 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAILY  LIFE    145 

It  was  religious  to  give  old  clothing  to  naked 
families.  It  was  secular  to  introduce  looms, 
sheep,  reindeer,  and  to  teach  the  women  to 
weave  durable  and  fitting  woolen  clothing 
for  their  families.  It  was  religious  to  pray 
that  God  would  keep  idle  folk's  hands  from 
mischief.  It  was  secular  to  set  to  work  to 
keep  those  same  hands  remuneratively  busy. 
Finally,  in  Labrador,  none  but  "fossil  men" 
wondered  why  every  one  wanted  to  be 
**  worldly."  If  Christ's  men  are  to  be  known 
by  their  works,  surely  Christ's  work  is  to 
be  known  by  its  efficiency  to  redeem. 

I  have  spent  now  much  of  your  time  and 
mine  in  defending  the  perfect  rationality 
of  Christian  faith.  I  have  suggested  many 
times  that  like  all  other  things  it  must  be 
accepted  or  rejected  on  the  ground  of  its 
practical  value.  But  I  realize  that  it  is  as  a 
surgeon  that  I  am  addressing  you.  I  would 
naturally  expect  you  to  ask  now,  "What  are 
the  specific  things  which  I  can  do  to  gain 
the  faith  which  you  consider  so  valuable?  " 

If  I  am  right  and  you  are  looking  to  these 


14f6         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

lectures  for  such  advice  as  I  may  have  to 
give  here  and  now  from  my  own  experience, 
I  should  say  first  of  all  cut  out  whatever  sin 
you  are  conscious  of.  You  will  find  it  an 
immense  help  to  let  it  be  known  on  which 
side  you  are.  It  takes  a  lot  of  pluck  to  do 
that,  but  it  makes  a  man  of  one.  It  is  still 
true  that  *'  whosoever  would  save  his  life 
shall  lose  it,"  and  it  must  often  be  at  the 
cost  of  ambition  and  popularity  that  the 
door  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  opened. 

If  the  certain  deterioration  of  physical 
and  mental  capacities  through  dallying  in 
the  slightest  degree  with  drink  and  vice 
does  not  deter  men  from  indulging  in  them, 
at  least  if  they  will  follow  the  Christ  they 
will  refrain  for  the  sake  of  making  the  path 
of  righteousness  easier  for  others. 

All  through  my  lectures  my  attitude 
will  have  appeared  as  depreciative  to  the 
organized  churches.  Believe  me,  my  criti- 
cisms, are  the  wounds  of  a  friend.  I  realize 
that  the  conditions  in  America  to-day  are 
not  those  of  England  twenty  years  ago.  The 


CHRIST  AND  THE   DAILY  LIFE    147 

church  certainly  is  beginning  to  wake  up. 
Its  members  are  realizing  that  there  is  a 
loose  screw,  and  are  looking  about  to  lo- 
cate it.  I  believe  to-day  you  will  find  in 
her  that  which  is  essential  for  your  develop- 
ment, namely,  constructive  work  which 
you  can  do.  She  will  also  give  you  the  real- 
ization of  spiritual  fellowship  between  your- 
self and  God,  and  between  yourself  and 
others  who  are  in  earnest  about  life,  which 
it  is  her  especial  prerogative  to  afford,  and 
of  which  she  should  allow  no  other  interest 
to  deprive  her.  Join  her  and  help  her.  She, 
too,  to-day  is  making  for  the  uplift  of  hu- 
manity. She  needs  all  you  can  give;  and 
she  certainly  will  give  it  back  to  you  again 
with  interest. 

For  my  part,  I  find  the  world  is  good.  It 
is  a  most  reliable  paymaster,  whichever 
way  you  make  your  investment,  and  I  am 
glad  to  be  in  it.  Everything  seems  to  have 
a  purpose,  and  from  that  fact  I  deduce  a 
purposer.  The  world  seems  reasonable,  and 
therefore  likely  to  end  reasonably.  Theevo- 


148         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

lution  of  love,  the  development  of  intellect, 
the  unceasing  metabolism  of  the  body,  con- 
sidered with  the  principle  of  the  conserva- 
tion of  energy,  always  seemed  to  me  to  argue 
against  the  annihilation  of  personality.  But 
after  all,  it  is  only  a  reasonable  service  in 
this  world,  not  omniscience,  which  is  asked 
of  me.  Some  men  hate  the  whole  universe, 
because  they  realize  how  brief  the  tenure  of 
the  things  they  love  in  life  is.  But  I  am  no 
pessimist.  Knowing  that  I  only  stay  for  a 
time  alongside  of  what  I  call  my  property, 
I  am  still  delighted  with  all  I  get,  enjoying 
immensely  the  use  of  it  while  I  have  it,  and 
believing,  as  Christ  teaches,  that  so-called 
death  cannot  rob  me  of  spiritual  friendships 
and  assets.  If  I  count  what  I  can  contribute 
to  life,  and  not  what  I  can  get  out  of  it,  that 
of  itself  makes  it  worth  while.  The  gauge 
is  not  what  we  have,  but  what  we  do  with 
what  we  have. 

I  am  as  sure  that  I  am  not  my  body  as  I 
am  that  I  am  not  my  house.  But  for  all  that, 
I  know  that  I  am  I,  and  that  I  shall  always 


CHRIST  AND   THE   DAILY  LIFE    149 

continue  to  be  so  is  sufficiently  probable 
to  satisfy  me.  Exactly  what  will  befall  me 
hereafter  has  not  yet  entered  into  the  heart 
of  man.  Judging  from  popular  ideas,  very 
far  from  it. 

That  men  in  this  world  are  by  no  means 
physically  equally  endowed,  every  doctor 
knows,  and  every  mother  ought  to  know. 
Christ  never  taught  that  they  were.  He 
insisted  only  that  we  should  recognize  our 
common  brotherhood,  not  that  we  should 
quarrel  about  being  unequal.  As  for  the 
free-will  controversy,  Christ  taught  that 
the  only  free  men  are  those  whom  he  sets 
free  from  the  slavery  of  self.  Self-service 
was  the  captivity  from  which  he  came  to 
set  his  people  free. 

To  suppose  that  all  men's  intellectual 
capacities  are  identical  is  absurd,  and  yet 
with  this  premise  in  a  world  of  utterly  im- 
perfect knowledge  we  play  at  the  solution 
of  religious  unity,  as  if,  under  the  circum- 
stances, it  could  ever  be  uniformity,  either 
in  thought  or  in  method  of  expression.  There 


150         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

must  ever  be  endless  permutations  and  com- 
binations when  it  comes  to  intellectual  ap- 
prehensions. So  long  as  we  cling  to  any  hu- 
manly devised  definitions,  which  we  insist 
upon  as  articles  of  faith  necessary  to  salva- 
tion, we  shall  inevitably  insure  discord  for 
all  time.  Together  with  these  initial  dif- 
ferences, and  with  imperfect  data,  we  must 
take  into  consideration  the  changes  which 
new  environments  and  new  experiences 
make  in  the  same  individual.  Thus  for  my 
own  part  I  was  once  absolutely  intolerant 
of  all  forms  and  ceremonies  in  public  wor- 
ship. Now  I  expect  to  value  ever  more  and 
more  beauty  and  orderliness  in  the  expres- 
sion of  it. 

At  the  time  of  my  own  decision,  twenty- 
five  years  ago,  the  current  version  of  the 
doctrine  of  evolution  was  a  very  new  and 
staggering  idea  to  every  one.  But  my  faith 
was  never  seriously  troubled.  Perhaps  the 
fact  that  at  that  time  I  was  deep  in  the 
study  of  anatomy  and  physiology  showed 
me  that  the  temple  of  man's  soul  was  so 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAILY  LIFE    151 

marvelously  adapted  to  the  environment 
of  a  world  like  this,  that  I  saw  no  reason 
why  we  should  have  expected,  as  Balfour 
has  since  suggested,  that  just  because  a 
similar  form  suited  lower  animals,  some 
new  design  ought  to  have  been  devised  for 
us.  Further,  evolutionists  argued,  not  only 
that  all  improvements  in  physical  conditions 
were  attained  by  intellectual  processes  such 
as  the  Davy  safety  lamp,  or  Jenner's  vac- 
cine, merely  fortuitous  advances  further 
fitting  our  race  for  survival,  but  also  that 
every  disinterested  motive,  every  spiritual 
impulse  was  just  one  more  device  for  the 
same  end.  I  never  could  believe  such  good 
fruit  could  come  from  such  unpromising 
trees.  Anyhow,  I  did  n't  want  to  believe 
it,  for  the  boys  I  was  teaching  at  that  time 
needed  no  encouragement  to  go  and  steal 
the  jam,  as  I  found  more  than  once  at  our 
annual  summer  encampment. 

Materialism  has  shot  its  bolt  anyway, 
and  of  late  the  pendulum  has  swung  the 
other  way.     The  new  knowledge  of  the 


152         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

periodic  law,  the  divisibility  of  the  atom, 
the  possible  identity  and  intermutability  of 
what  we  used  to  consider  elements,  the  hypo- 
thesis that  all  matter  is  only  after  all  a  form 
of  electricity  or  motion,  the  discovery  of  ra- 
dium and  the  suggestion  of  the  possibility 
of  perpetual  motion,  all  show  us  that  of  all 
the  ways  in  which  we  interpret  Scripture, 
none  can  possibly  be  considered  final.  Or- 
thodox Christianity  has  suffered  a  good  deal 
from  lack  of  humility,  but  our  scientific 
friends  have  little  to  boast  of  in  that  direc- 
tion. 

Because  no  one  has  been  able  to  compre- 
hend the  doctrine  of  the  Atonement,  or  to 
compress  the  definition  of  it  into  words,  I 
see  no  reason  to  reject  it,  or  for  me  to  be 
anxious  for  those  who  fail  to  accept  it.  De- 
finitions and  doctrines,  anyhow,  were  never 
vital  to  my  faith.  The  realization  of  a  hving 
Christ,  with  all  that  that  implies,  seems  all 
that  he  expected  of  me.  Just  to  live,  "as 
seeing  him  who  is  invisible,"  is  my  one  ideal 
which  embraces  all  the  lesser  ideals  of  my 


CHRIST  AND  THE  DAILY  LIFE     153 

life;  to  do  in  all  circumstances  what  I  think 
he  would  do  in  my  place,  not  what  he  would 
have  done  in  Judaea  two  thousand  years 
ago.  There  was  no  temptation  to  waste 
golden  hours  over  bridge-whist  in  those 
days. 

The  expression  of  my  religion  has  to  be 
practical  to  satisfy  me,  though  I  have  no 
doubt  whatever  of  the  religion  of  those 
who  are  satisfied  with  mystical  experiences 
alone.  I  quite  realize  that  my  faith  is  only 
faith.  But  I  know  that  every  one  has  to 
begin  all  knowledge  with  faith.  My  faith 
is  only  my  base  for  action,  as  is  every  one's 
else.  Moreover,  it  is  the  only  possible  base. 
The  faith  of  exceedingly  fallible  senses  is 
at  the  bottom  of  all  actions.  It  is  a  marvel 
that  we  get  on  as  well  as  we  do,  seeing  that 
the  evidence  of  our  senses  so  frequently  de- 
ceives us.  In  reality  they  afford  us  no  road 
at  all  by  which  to  arrive  at  truth. 

To  act  on  faith  seems  to  me  to  be  on  surer 
ground,  and  I  try  to  strengthen  it  by  read- 
ing my  Bible  with  common  sense.    I  am 


154        THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

glad  to  believe  that  his  faith  gave  Barti- 
meus  his  eyesight,  —  especially  for  Barti- 
meus'  sake,  —  for  the  value  to  me  to-day  of 
a  single  cure  done  nineteen  hundred  years 
ago  is  problematical,  unless  it  teaches  me 
how  to  repeat  it.  But  I  believe  my  faith  not 
only  made  me  see,  but  what  is  more,  I  do 
actually  believe  it  has  enabled  me  to  help 
others  to  their  vision,  both  physically  and 
mentally. 

But  what  is  the  use  of  all  this  talking!  I 
would  not  cross  the  road,  much  less  come 
all  the  way  from  Labrador,  unless  I  felt 
there  was  some  desirable  end  which  might 
be  reached  thereby.  The  object  of  the  Noble 
Lectures,  as  I  have  said,  seemed  to  me  a 
decidedly  practical  one,  namely,  to  induce 
in  the  minds  of  the  hearers  a  keener  desire 
to  stand  in  life  for  just  those  things  that 
Christ  stood  for,  to  beget  a  determination 
to  reincarnate  his  life,  and  so  attain  the 
whole  achievement  of  which  ours  is  capable. 

How  far  this  effort  has  been  successful 
only  God  knows.  I  have  worried  you  with 


CHRIST   AND   THE   DAILY  LIFE    155 

long  lists  of  names  of  men  and  the  long  re- 
cords of  deductions  from  other  lives  than 
mine,  solely  because  it  seemed  to  me  that 
the  best  way  to  advocate  the  adoption  of 
principles  is  to  illustrate  their  effect  in  ac- 
tion. Moreover,  it  is  only  from  the  em- 
pirical standpoint  that  I,  a  physician  from 
the  confines  of  civilization,  venture  to  ad- 
dress you  in  this  metropolis  of  all  philo- 
sophies. The  knowledge  of  the  immense 
factor  in  public  life  which  your  universities 
have  become  was  an  additional  incentive, 
emboldening  me  to  accept  the  invitation 
you  extended. 

I  have  seen  the  results  of  the  change  of 
attitude  of  the  exponents  of  Christ's  relig- 
ion from  the  controversial  and  tyrannical 
methods  of  so  many  centuries  back  to  the 
brotherly  methods  of  the  Master;  from 
the  failure  of  their  attempts  to  be  their 
brother's  keeper,  to  success  in  becoming 
their  brother's  brother.  And  to-day,  ten 
times  more  than  ever  before,  I  am  an  op- 
timist as  to  the  future.  In  spite  of  the  in- 


156         THE  ADVENTURE  OF  LIFE 

crease  of  Dreadnoughts  and  superdread- 
noughts,  I  seem  to  see  a  distinct  moral 
progress  in  the  relation  of  nations  to  one 
another,  and  in  the  new  social  movement 
opportunities  and  improvement  in  the  rela- 
tion of  man  to  man.  Experience  has  taught 
me  what  a  blessing  for  the  real  ills  of  hu- 
manity this  promises.  Surely  I  may  plead 
that  it  is  as  compelling  a  force  to  a  physi- 
cian, this  desire  to  give  to  others  the  bene- 
fits of  a  remedy  he  has  come  to  value  so 
highly  himself,  as  is  any  professional  oath 
he  may  have  taken  to  keep  secret  no  treat- 
ment he  uses  for  physical  ailments.  Pos- 
terity has  nothing  but  blame  for  a  Morton 
who  tried  to  patent  the  discovery  of  ether 
for  his  own  benefit. 

If  our  eyes  are  only  open  for  vision,  in 
ten  thousand  daily  experiences  we  cannot 
fail  to  see  opportunities  for  what  we  can 
give.  We  shall  see  God  himself,  not  waiting 
for  us  to  be  good,  but  seeking  our  coopera- 
tion just  where  we  stand,  in  the  establish- 
ment of  his  Kingdom.  What  could  be  more 


CHRIST   AND  THE   DAILY  LIFE     157 

terrible  than  to  have  to  look  back  upon  a 
life  of  opportunities,  as  is  that  of  each  of 
you,  all  of  which  we  had  let  slip ! 

This  experience  brings  me  here  to-day  to 
try  to  induce  you  to  accept  as  your  life 
axiom,  not  merely  that  God  was  once  re- 
incarnated in  human  life,  as  an  emotional 
submission,  but  that  as  an  everyday  matter 
of  fact  Christ  walks  in  our  streets  to-day, 
and  can  again  prove  his  divinity  to  us  be- 
yond question  if  we  will  permit  him,  by 
living  in  our  human  lives.  There  is  no  life 
but  the  life  which  comes  from  him;  to  me, 
as  I  have  said,  the  rest  is  merely  existence. 
The  reason  that  Christ  came  was  that  we 
might  have  life,  here  and  now,  and  that 
we  might  have  it  more  and  more  abun- 
dantly. 

THE  END 


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of  singular  interest,  and  his  description  of  the  conduct  of  his 
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to  be  sentimental  in  his  views. .  .  .  The  record  is  told  with  such 
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THE  CORNER  OF 
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PETER  HARDING,  M.D. 

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high  praise  of  the  doctoring  trade."  — London  Punch. 

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A  YEAR  IN  A  COAL-MINE 


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THE  CONFESSIONS  OF  A 
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By  J.  O.  FAGAN 


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road accidents,  and  the  confessor  is  manifestly  a  man 
not  only  of  remarkable  discernment,  but  likewise  of 
rhetorical  skill."  —  Stone  and  Webster  Public  Service 
Journal. 

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THIS  BOOK  IS  DITE  OK  THE  I.AST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 

w.':!.i^'7s's'^4.rV':f.°'^    2^    CENTS 


APR   10  193 

JUN    7    1934 
NOV   1*?  193^ 


YB  22127 


30402df 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


